End of the Innocence
This CD strays from the Country Rock theme of the blog, but this Don Henley, you cannot pass up.
By the time he published "The End of the Innocence," Don Henley's name was as firmly established as that of a successful solo artist as it had previously come to be known as one of the driving forces behind the Eagles' almost decade-long success. Commercially his most successful album and critically his most acclaimed, his third solo release garnered a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocalist (for the title track) and produced several more hit singles besides "The End of the Innocence:" "The Heart of the Matter," "New York Minute," "How Bad Do You Want It?" and "Last Worthless Evening." Stylistically, the album ranges from ballads like the piano-driven title song (co-written by Bruce Hornsby, whose fingerprints are all over its instrumentation; not just in the keyboards but also in the saxophone solo, performed by Wayne Shorter, and in the song's main theme), "The Last Worthless Evening," and Don Henley's variation on the theme of forgiveness, "The Heart of the Matter" (a song that took him "42 years to write," as he explained during the opening show of the Eagles' "Hell Freezes Over" tour) - all the way to hard-rocking tunes like "I Will Not Go Quietly," featuring background vocals by Axl Rose. In between are the jazzy, introspective "New York Minute," yet another (percussion- and rhythm-driven) warning that the world "ain't no Shangri-La," the deceptively light-footed "Little Tin God," and no less than three hard, edgy songs rounding up Henley's damning verdict on Reaganomics ("How Bad Do You Want It?," "Gimme What You Got" and "If Dirt Were Dollars").
As were his previous solo albums, "The End of the Innocence" was co-produced and largely co-written by Danny Kortchmar, and likewise as on the previous albums, Henley enlisted the cooperation of a number of other outstanding musicians - in addition to Kortchmar, Hornsby, Shorter and Rose, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Julia and Maxine Waters, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch, Toto's David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, "inofficial Eagle" J.D. Souther, and many others. Except for his greatest hits album, 1995's "Actual Miles," this was also to be the last record Don Henley would publish on Geffen; a label he did not leave without a fight (which alongside the Eagles' reunion, his marriage and his preoccupation with the Walden Woods Project, he would later list as one of the reasons why he did not produce another new album in all of eleven years).
Henley is well-known to be a perfectionist and is sometimes criticized for allegedly overly "slick" productions; a statement usually going hand in hand with accusations of superficiality and occasionally even hypocrisy (his records did, after all, earn him millions; so how serious can he be about his social criticism?). But it doesn't even take a look at his efforts to preserve the environment (in the Walden Woods Project and elsewhere), his recently formed coalition for artists' rights, and his testimony before Congress on a variety of related topics to doubt the accuracy of that assessment. This guy means every word he writes; just listen to his lyrics - and as long as "we got the bully pulpit and the poisoned pen" and "this brave new world [is] gone bad again" ("If Dirt Were Dollars [we'd all be in the black]"), he'll be around to hold up a mirror before our eyes.
By the time he published "The End of the Innocence," Don Henley's name was as firmly established as that of a successful solo artist as it had previously come to be known as one of the driving forces behind the Eagles' almost decade-long success. Commercially his most successful album and critically his most acclaimed, his third solo release garnered a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocalist (for the title track) and produced several more hit singles besides "The End of the Innocence:" "The Heart of the Matter," "New York Minute," "How Bad Do You Want It?" and "Last Worthless Evening." Stylistically, the album ranges from ballads like the piano-driven title song (co-written by Bruce Hornsby, whose fingerprints are all over its instrumentation; not just in the keyboards but also in the saxophone solo, performed by Wayne Shorter, and in the song's main theme), "The Last Worthless Evening," and Don Henley's variation on the theme of forgiveness, "The Heart of the Matter" (a song that took him "42 years to write," as he explained during the opening show of the Eagles' "Hell Freezes Over" tour) - all the way to hard-rocking tunes like "I Will Not Go Quietly," featuring background vocals by Axl Rose. In between are the jazzy, introspective "New York Minute," yet another (percussion- and rhythm-driven) warning that the world "ain't no Shangri-La," the deceptively light-footed "Little Tin God," and no less than three hard, edgy songs rounding up Henley's damning verdict on Reaganomics ("How Bad Do You Want It?," "Gimme What You Got" and "If Dirt Were Dollars").
As were his previous solo albums, "The End of the Innocence" was co-produced and largely co-written by Danny Kortchmar, and likewise as on the previous albums, Henley enlisted the cooperation of a number of other outstanding musicians - in addition to Kortchmar, Hornsby, Shorter and Rose, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Julia and Maxine Waters, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch, Toto's David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, "inofficial Eagle" J.D. Souther, and many others. Except for his greatest hits album, 1995's "Actual Miles," this was also to be the last record Don Henley would publish on Geffen; a label he did not leave without a fight (which alongside the Eagles' reunion, his marriage and his preoccupation with the Walden Woods Project, he would later list as one of the reasons why he did not produce another new album in all of eleven years).
Henley is well-known to be a perfectionist and is sometimes criticized for allegedly overly "slick" productions; a statement usually going hand in hand with accusations of superficiality and occasionally even hypocrisy (his records did, after all, earn him millions; so how serious can he be about his social criticism?). But it doesn't even take a look at his efforts to preserve the environment (in the Walden Woods Project and elsewhere), his recently formed coalition for artists' rights, and his testimony before Congress on a variety of related topics to doubt the accuracy of that assessment. This guy means every word he writes; just listen to his lyrics - and as long as "we got the bully pulpit and the poisoned pen" and "this brave new world [is] gone bad again" ("If Dirt Were Dollars [we'd all be in the black]"), he'll be around to hold up a mirror before our eyes.
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