(Credits: TIDAL)
Wed 10 December 2025 19:30, UK
There are plenty of vocalists who would have killed to have the voice Don Henley had in his prime.
He might not have the same kind of range as Freddie Mercury by any stretch, but he was always willing to push himself a little bit further if it meant that he had the kind of performance that he wanted whenever the Eagles took to the stage. That ‘Golden Throat’ may have carried them through some tough times, but that doesn’t mean that everything that Henley released was absolutely spotless, either.
For instance, Henley wasn’t the kind of person who woke up one morning and realised he could sing. A lot of those vocal harmonies came from years of the band harmonising with Linda Ronstadt until they finally had the right mesh of voices to go out on their own. And once he learned what he could do, Henley made it his personal mission to find the limit of where he could take his voice on record.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that he was going to be screaming at the top of his lungs when he went into the studio, but there would always be the odd tune where he could switch things up. He was a natural baritone throughout most of his career, but listening to a song like ‘One of These Nights’, he clearly had the high range of any of the Gibb brothers, and a lot of his best moments on a song like ‘Wasted Time’ involved him taking the rudiments of country rock and combining them with R&B.
But a lot of those classics involved a lot of growing up in between. Henley was the first person to consider some of their early songs to be a bit corny, but if tracks like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’ have lasted as classics from that time, Desperado was going to have a lot of blind spots as a whole compared to the rest of their discography.
The idea was definitely there for them to make a great album about the dangers of the music industry and the outlaw-musician correlation, but there was not enough fat there to make for a great conceptual piece like Hotel California would become. And for a singer who was just finding himself the same way that Henley was, the less said about the version of his voice on ‘Desperado’, the better off he would be.
He already had nerves listening to the track and singing with string sections behind him, but of all the versions of the song that have been made, Henley makes it a point to avoid the original vocal at all costs, saying, “I was scared stiff. I had never sung in front of a large orchestra before, and I was only given about four or five takes to get it right. (I still wince whenever I hear that 1973 vocal on the radio.) My friend and former bandmate, Jim Ed Norman, who had written the string charts, was conducting the orchestra. He was nervous, too, I think, but he didn’t let it show.”
The vocal doesn’t sound amateurish by any means, but you definitely hear what Henley was talking about. What he would do later would leave this vocal in the dust in many respects, but even when looking at those heights, playing this song with the world-weary feel that he has is the right approach for someone talking to an outlaw about how their life on the run is going to end up killing them.
So even if there are a million times where Henley felt that ‘Desperado’ could’ve been done better, there’s something charming about hearing that initial version. Linda Ronstadt may have knocked it out of the park as well, and Henley still has affection for the song every single time he sings it, but it’s more about where he is in the moment these days than worrying about that one fateful recording session when he put the whole thing on tape.
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