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Sat 15 August 2026 19:00, UK
Don Henley didn’t envision himself as one of the biggest rock stars in the world when he first started hashing out his first songs.
His stint in his original band, Shiloh, was always going to be rough around the edges, but with the help of Kenny Rogers, he at least had a firm foundation for what he wanted to do whenever he worked on some of his later records with the Eagles. But if he was going to become an honest-to-God songwriter, he was going to take baby steps before he reached the same heights that he reached on ‘Hotel California’.
And when you look at those early tunes he had in his arsenal, it’s not like he was trying to make some of the most thoughtful tunes of all time. Shiloh did have a bunch of catchy tunes across that first album, but there’s a good chance that most people weren’t exactly going to be itching to turn on the stereo to hear a surefire hit like ‘A Simple Little Down Home Rock and Roll Love Song for Rosie’ or anything. But when working with Linda Ronstadt, he had a better idea of what a hit should sound like.
He knew Ronstadt’s music inside and out well before he started playing with her, and when working with Glenn Frey, he had someone that he could bounce ideas off of. But whereas Henley was just getting started writing songs, Frey had a lot more discipline when he first began writing tunes by listening to his neighbour, Jackson Browne. He knew how to woodshed material, but that first Eagles album showed both of them sounding fairly green.
No one knew that Henley’s voice was their secret weapon just yet, and even though two of the biggest songs on the album were sung by Frey, ‘Witchy Woman’ had a much darker sound that fit right in with what Henley wanted to do. It wasn’t the most perfectly written song in the world, but Henley figured that it was a fine enough place for him to start before he branched out into other things.
Even years after the fact, Henley considered the song to be one of the most pivotal steps that he took when woodshedding his songs, saying, “It had a haunting quality, and I thought it was interesting, so we put a rough version of it down on a cassette tape. Shortly after that, I came down with the flu. I had a very high fever and became semi-delirious at times — and that’s when I wrote most of the lyrics. An important song for me, because it marked the beginning of my professional songwriting career.”
The song isn’t exactly the most easygoing song of all time, but that’s usually how Henley liked to write. He didn’t want to sit around and write the traditional love songs that everyone else was known for, and a lot of his favourite tunes to write were the ones that asked the tough questions. He was the one singing tunes like ‘One of These Nights’, but ‘Desperado’ was a much better look at the heartfelt side of him than anything else.
Further reading: From The Vault
That same kind of approach also carried into his solo career as well. Any number of his solo records were all about him trying to make a broader statement other than simple rock and roll tunes, and it’s interesting to see him taking major steps to get from ‘Witchy Woman’ straight through to ‘The Last Resort’ and then getting even more personal on songs like ‘The End of the Innocence’ and ‘A Month of Sundays’.
The world was wide open once he started to break away from the usual country songs, but ‘Witchy Woman’ is still considered the one moment where everything turned a corner. He had been a standard musician who knew how to sing a song or two, but when his fever subsided that fateful day, he had the perfect guide to where his career would be going for the next 50 years.
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