The Beatles song Don Henley could listen to “over and over” | CPT PPP Coverage

So, Henley wouldn’t have been too surprised that the song became a global hit almost incomparable in alternative music. Because, in his view, all the best songs are laments. “I think the best songs are sad songs,” he said at a Q&A event in Dallas in 2017. “I don’t enjoy happy little songs.”

He then paraphrased his music hero on the matter, the songwriter Henley called “a national treasure,” by explaining: “Randy Newman said something, that happy songs are actually harder to write. Because you have to keep it funny, you have to start funny, there has to be a middle funny part and then you have to end funny, and that is really difficult to do.”

But, just because sadder songs might be easier to write, that doesn’t make them less valid; on the contrary, in fact, as the Eagles continually proved, the seamlessness and emotive nature of melancholic tracks can make them more immediate, beloved, and in that sense superior. “Sad songs, all the great romantic songs throughout history, from Frank Sinatra to Paul McCartney, every great songwriter does his best work writing sad songs,” he said.

“You can only hear ‘You Are My Sunshine’ so many times. On the other hand, I could listen to ‘Yesterday’ by Paul McCartney over and over and over again.” For McCartney, the sadness he spoke of wasn’t immediate. The melody simply came to him in a dream, and he kept humming ‘Scrambled Eggs’ in order to retain it, later formulating the song after he realised the syllables of ‘Yesterday’ while on a long drive on a Portuguese holiday when he couldn’t sleep in the backseat.

Thus, we can assume that the sorrow in the song is a sort of distant encapsulation, which is ratified by Henley’s own view of his saddest tracks come about. “I think we’ve all been hurt at one time or another,” he explained, “Especially when I was a kid in high school, in junior high, you get beat up, you get bullied. And I’ve had a lot of girlfriends. It’s like Joni Mitchell said, you take all your pain and you turn it into art. That’s what you do with it.”

He concluded: “Most great art has some tragic element to it. Paintings, songs, films, it’s just part of the process. And it’s so much easier to work from tragedy than it is from… I can’t even think of any happy songs that I like.”

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