Glenn to be Guest at Songwriters Hall of Fame Master Session at NYU

[Henley Honey]

OK -- last installment for tonight -- cause I'm going blind trying to decifer my notes.

We are still on LITFL. They played the intro and Glenn said: "Makes you want to get high, doesn't it?" That got a laugh from the audience.
They played it partway through and continued the discussion on its structure. How it only had a half chorus in the beginning and that was because they felt it was important to get back to the story and then include the entire chorus later on in the song. They discussed how in the beginning of the song the characters are described physically (brutally handsome/terminally pretty) rather than describing their situations which came later in the song. Glenn said: "part of telling the story is to make the characters look a little more glamorous and interesting." His point was you have to leave somewhere for the characters to go in the story.

He added: "We used to have a saying in the Eagles, which was -- everything changes once Don starts singing -- and in a song like LITFL he is such a compelling vocalist that he becomes the center of the record. He is telling the story. He becomes the narrator and you want to listen to him." Glenn compared it to hearing Michael McDonald sing -- that you're just drawn in.

"Starting with OOTN, personally, all I cared about was singing one song on an Eagles album and I just wanted to write a bunch of songs with Don for Don to sing because he was money. He was straight to the radio."

Glenn was asked about any material that the Eagles may have done but never released. He said no, that if they felt a song wasn't good enough to be released they'd never have finished it. It was in the context of not using all their material where Glenn said Don Felder would bring them songs and 90% of them had so many guitar parts there was no room for vocals and therefore not used -- with one exception -- and that was Hotel California.

(Soda, please double check your notes on the above Felder section as I don't want to misinterpret what Glenn said or what he meant!!!) He was in no way derogatory to Don Felder.

Glenn and Don (Henley) really liked the synthesis of the Mexican/Raggae sound on Hotel California. Glenn said he likes songs with multiple influences. He said it makes them more interesting.

More tomorrow -- or maybe Soda wants to pick it up from here?