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Every songwriter is bound to get stale if they have the same approach to writing songs. It’s one thing to have one trick that you’re really good at pulling off, but even the most seasoned fans are going to want to see something other than the same track ten times over the course of one record. And while Joe Walsh is more than capable of making a diverse record from beginning to end even without Eagles, he knew that he worked best when working off of other people.
When Walsh first joined the country rockers, he was ready to add guitar parts to anything Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote. He said numerous times that he was almost intimidated by working with two people who could write music so well, but when listening to his guitar parts on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, it was like the icing on the cake as they were telling the story of the dark side of Hollywood.
And once the band got back on their feet in the studio on their comeback record Long Road Out of Eden, Walsh was still in rare form. Since a lot of the record was self-serious about the state of the world, tunes like ‘Last Good Time in Town’ brought a lot of levity to the situation, and for any song that needed a solo, Walsh brought the perfect brash energy to tracks like ‘How Long’ or ‘Busy Being Fabulous’.
After a while, though, people were itching to hear what Walsh could do on his own again. He had friends in high places over the past few years working with Eagles and being a major force in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, but he wanted to stretch himself as an artist a bit more. This was the same person who created the major journey of ‘Life’s Been Good’, and when working on Analog Man, he realised that he had a godsend in Jeff Lynne when he got behind the board.
Granted, Lynne was practically a production god by this point. He had already worked magic for The Beatles for the Anthology project, and when George Harrison knew that he was dying of cancer, Lynne was the only one he felt comfortable handing his demo tapes over to when completing the songs for Brainwashed.
Compared to the live feeling of every other Walsh album, though, Lynne liked to layer instruments on top of each other, which helped restructure the guitarist’s typical approach, saying, “He was going to have a listen, maybe play something. He ended up producing. I knew of Jeff, but I didn’t know a lot about him – he has opened up some new ways for me to think about how the songs could sound and we’ve just gotten on brilliantly.”
Yes, there had been the odd guitar extravaganza on Eagles records, but this was Walsh approaching the modern era on his terms. He was a few years away from working on records with Foo Fighters, but there were also plenty of opportunities for him to stretch here, especially when those signature bends kick in that make the guitar sound like it’s crying out in pain.
Although Lynne is one of the last people to consider himself a true rock and roll god, his role in the music industry has been about being a mentor to the greatest artists to walk the Earth. Most of them might not have needed that kind of push behind the scenes, but looking at what he could get out of everyone from Walsh to Paul McCartney to Tom Petty, he never wanted to serve anything other than the song.
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