The White Paper: Don Henley's 'Inside Job' (Continued)

How about “Building the Perfect Beast” in 1984?

Let’s see. I still like “The Boys of Summer”; I don’t get tired of that song, and we’re rearranged it for the upcoming tour. And “You Can’t Make Love” is an interesting song about truth and semantics.

There’s a song that was on the cassette and CD but not on the original vinyl record because there wasn’t room—“A Month of Sundays.” I think it’s one of my best songs, and it was written back during the time when the American farmers were speaking out about their plight. And small farmers were losing their farms, and they had all those terrible, sad land auctions, and everything was going on the block—farms that had been in families for generations were being sold.

And that’s when Farm Aid began, around that time. I went to Washington and marched with the farmers. IT was a rainy day, and we all gathered at the Lincoln Memorial.

As an environmentalist, I have to say I have some conflicts with farming practices. I have a deep love and empathy for that lifestyle, because my father grew up on a farm, and he taught me how to grow things in the soil. On the other hand farming pollutes the shit out of the planet with fertilizers, pesticides, and chemicals of all sorts. And certain modern methods of farming cause erosion so that we’re losing an enormous amount of topsoil. Organic farming is my method of choice, and that’s a growing movement in this country.

“A Month of Sundays” is also about the passing of the torch and the changes in the American landscape—and the malling of America.

And there were two rhythm-and-blues song s of mine that got overlooked; both were on “Building the Perfect Beast.” One is “Land of the Living” and the other is “Not Enough Love in the World”, which I thought and even David Geffen thought would be a big hit, but it wasn’t. I thought that we could have done better on the production of that song, but it was a tip of the hat to Motown and well-written. Jackson Browne thought it was a great song, but people don’t accept that part of my work.

Too much diversity, I’ve found, confuses record companies and confuses radio; they’re used to monochromatic records and monolithic artists.

What do you think of “The End of the Innocence” from 1989?

I still love the song “New York Minute,” and “The Last Worthless Evening” is just straight-ahead pop, but it’s good. And of course, “The End of the Innocence”; that song I very fixed in time. I think it has enough universality that it could still apply to today, but it was about the whole Reagan era.

I’ve heard people say “The Hart of the Matter” was their favorite song—period.

I have a collection of the most amazing letters about that song from all over the world that I treasure. I’m gonna keep them forever.

Again such things show popular music does have an impact and creates a dialogue.

True—not a revolution, maybe, but a damned good dialogue.

Any thoughts on the “Actual Miles: Henley’s Greatest Hits” collection?

It was a bridge from one period of my musical life and career to another. I think it’s a good record with a good additional songs on it. I still stand by “The Garden of Allah,” but radio didn’t want it, like it, play it. And “You Don’t Know Me At All” was a good pop song, but I just wanted to get that stage of my life over and get on with the next stage—as the cover of the album depicted.

The used-car salesman image was a jab at corporate culture, but one critic put down my appearance as if I had always dressed that way. He didn’t even get the joke on that. Some people don’t understand the used-car lot experience.

As with “Inside Job,” there’s food for thought in all your solo records.

Well, that’s the best thing anybody could ever say about these records. The highest compliment anybody could pay me. I appreciate that.

And I thought about it now, and thought, “Well, I’ve been away 11 years, I really need some hit singles.” But there’s room on an album; this one’s got 13 fucking songs on it. And just because something’s a single doesn’t mean it has to be pabulum; it can still be heartfelt emotion.

My beliefs and the things I stand for are becoming stronger. If I tried to make a nice, light, fluffy, hooky little record, I don’t think I’m capable of doing it, because there’s part of me that always wins out. [Laughs]

It’s like a hand on a Ouija board—it just goes where it’s gonna go. And it’s something I’m grateful for. But Stan Lynch also did an amazing job on the new record; he’s become a great producer. A lot of the musical textures and the playing on the album were cone by him; everything from drums and a lot of guitar to percussion and sampling. I’ve got a great team in him and Rob Jacobs, my engineer, and the assistant engineer and keyboard player, Stuart Brawely. We’ve got some guests too: Randy Newman, Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Wonder and also Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, who plays on stuff like “They’re Not Here, They’re Not Coming.”

I think “They’re Not Here, They’re Not Coming” is a potential single that’s not pabulum and could be a hug hit. The music is thrilling, and the lyric needs to be heard, because it says we’re not entitled to a big event from the skies—whether it be flying saucers or supernovas—to entertain or redeem us. We don’t deserve it.

You’ve just articulated that song better than I could, and I’ve been trying for weeks. We’re always expecting to be saved form above. Something or somebody is going to come down from the heavens and make everything all right. When, in fact, we have to make everything all right.

And Mike Campbell was brilliant intuitively on that track; he realized the song was about spirituality and he gave me an Indian raga guitar solo—and that nails the spiritual side of it. It’s like an updated sitar thing.

And I did research on that song; the incident at Roswell happened in 1947, which is the year that I was born, and there’s a survey that about 50% of the American people believe that aliens have visited us and walk among us. That’s frightening! There’s cults that go out to Sedona, Arizona and sit there waiting. I subscribe to this magazine called Skeptical Inquirer, which does investigative reporting in every issue on paranormal phenomena.

Is there any place in any of your houses to sit down, or are the all covered with books?

[Giggles] There are no clear horizontal surfaces at all. There’s no place to eat. It’s true.

But I love Carl Sagan, bless his pot-smoking heart, who said it’s virtually impossible in books like “Contact” and “The Demon-Haunted World” for other human life to make it to this planet unless they have figured out a way to transcend time and space. You just can’t live long enough to do it.

So again, “They’re not Here” is a song about taking responsibility for your life—and the life of your country and the life of your family and the life of your culture. And it’s about doing it yourself.

There are other songs on the new album that could create commentary. One is “Damn It, Rose,” which bubbled up from my subconscious, but it’s about suicide, and specifically a suicide of someone I knew, and I almost took it off the album when I realized what I’d done. Yet it’s important to point out that suicide is an incredibly hostile, selfish act.

But I decided the song has more universal meaning than that. It’s about empty rebellion and the authenticity of our rebellion. That’s another theme that runs through this album: trying to find an authentic experience. They won’t play George Jones and Merle Haggard on the radio anymore, because most of these other artists on country radio are not authentic country people—they’re posing as country people.

There’s also the issue of revenge in the song and how revenge doesn’t really change anything. There are always unintentional victims, like innocent children, when it comes to revenge. It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences. In a moment of high emotion when you think you’re going to get back at someone, you invariably end up hurting other people.

People have no concept anymore of ordinary heroism. Take some kid who had a father who beat him every day with an ax handle, and his mother was worse. If that kid grows up and gets himself a TV show where he does the same thing to others—live, for money—then he’s treated like a hero, instead of the pandering coward he rally is.

Meanwhile, we need to celebrate a true hero like Frederick Douglass, a former slave who never had a nice day, yet grew up to be a far better person than anyone who ever wronged him.

See, we love to scapegoat these days and hang on to our past and attach blame to it and make that the reason for why we are the way we are in the present.

A real hero understand that there may be reason, but there are never any excuses.

Right! But rather than drawing a line in the sand and saying, “I’m going to change my life,” we’d rather wallow in all this dysfunction! We have the opportunity to start anew every day when we get up. That’s what the Eagles song “Get Over It” was about.

We’ve all had sorrow in our lives, and we’ve all had hardships, but compared to our ancestors, we’ve never had a bad day! While we were writing this album at his house, Stan came home with tears in his eyes on night after he ran into this old man who had been in a concentration camp during World War II.

Stan said, “You know what? After talking with that guy, I just realized that, even though my parents divorced when I was 14, or I’ve had my own ups and downs, and I experienced the career pain of leaving Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and son on, compared to that old man, I’ve never had a bad day.”

Another night I was grumbling about something. Stan went quietly into another room and came back with an urn that held the ashes of his Uncle Bernie from Cleveland, who had recently died. Stan plopped it in my lap and said, “Here! This is what it all comes down to!” And I said, “Ohh. I see.” And my mood brightened considerably. [Laughs]

We’re so spoiled in our culture, and some of my songs are aimed at my generation and how we all dropped the ball.

Our parents and grandparents cut us so much slack. They had been through the aftermath of slavery, wars, and holocausts; there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for us. We got too entitled about it. But it’s not too late to knock it off and show more leadership.

You’re right. I’ve lost friends over this kind of stuff. One friend was an environmental lawyer who espoused on ideal and yet was representing these developers killing the wetlands. After hearing her give all kinds of convoluted lawyerly justifications for it, I finally just stopped talking to her.

I still do a lot of conservation work in Texas, California, some in Colorado, and in Massachusetts for the Walden Woods Project, which people can now check out anytime at Walden.org

I still need to raise $12 million or $15 million for Walden Woods to endow the Thoreau Institute, so we’ve hired someone to help us raise foundation money. I’ll have to work on that for the next 10 or 20 years, but that’s OK.

These themes of acknowledging flaws, and offering admission of public responsibility and of public gratitude, are also in the new song “My Thanksgiving.”

Which would also make a great single.

I think so, too. To release it later in the year when Thanksgiving is actually coming would be a good thing, but it’s about how spoiled we are in comparison to other cultures and countries. We’re definitely headed to a fall-of-Rome type of time here.

Meanwhile, our tour starts at the end of May in Houston, and hopefully I’d like to do the whole planet! I’m up for it, with my new band—Will Hollis on keyboards; Mike Thompson on piano, accordion, and trombone, Lance Morrison on bass; Rob Ladd on drums; Peter Stroud and Frank Simes on guitars; and Danny Reyes on percussion. They’re fresh faces, new energy.

I want to give consumers good value, and my ticket prices will reflect that. And I debated putting 13 songs on the record, since my contract states that the record company only has to pay me for 12, but what the hell. WE used up all the space on the record.

I have a 14^th song, “Human Condition,” left over that has an R&B overtone and funny, wacky lyrics that I’ll use somewhere, sometime, in some way. But we started “Inside Job” in the fall of ’97, and now it’s done!

Meanwhile, my new daughter is going to be named Julia Sophia after my other grandmother, my father’s mother, and we’ll call her Sophie. And I’ve just discovered that I have some North Italian or Swiss Italian blood somewhere in my Irish-English-Texan family tree! Can you imagine? Things just get more interesting all of the time.