Track Listing

1. The End Of The Innocence
2. How Bad Do You Want It?
3. I Will Not Go Quietly
4. The Last Worthless Evening
5. New York Minute
6. Shangri-La
7. Little Tin God
8. Gimme What You Got
9. If Dirt Were Dollars
10. The Heart Of The Matter

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14545 in Music
• Released on: 1999-03-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 53 minutes

CD Description
This 1989 release captures Don Henley at his best, and boasts well-crafted songs elevated by stunning poetic images andreflective narratives. In fact, few pop artists know how toilluminate the human condition with quite the same amount of insight and ethos as Henley. "The Last Worthless Evening" and "The Heart of the Matter" offer unique perspectives on love and romance, while other tracks seek even greater, more expansive, artistic truth.
The melancholy title track creatively blends together political denunciations (allusions to Ronald Reagan) with personal reckonings of lost virtue. Inaddition, jazz legend Wayne Shorter's soaring soprano sax solo on the bridge adds an emotional climax that's truly extraordinary. Another single from the record, "New York Minute"tells a tale of suicidal desperation, but ends with a kind of crippled hope; this song finds resiliency in faith and understanding in defeat. THE END OF THE INNOCENCE stands as animportant pop record because of its lyrical brilliance, andits ability to speak so intimately to its listeners.

Customer Reviews

Award-winning ballads and Reaganomics: a Henley must-have.
"Remember when the days were long and rolled beneath a deep blue sky" ... remember Paradise Lost and the Last Resort? At the end of the 1980s, his awareness of society and what's wrong with it more acute than ever, on his third solo album Don Henley took up the theme of the closing song of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California" even more forcefully than on his two prior releases. Now, however, it was no longer just "somebody" who "laid the mountains low while the town got high." Now the enemy had a face; he was "the tired old man that we elected king;" that cowboy whose name was Jingo, and who "heard that there was trouble, so in a blaze of glory he rode out of the west - nobody was ever certain what it was that he was sayin' but they loved it when he told them they were better than the rest." ("Little Tin God.")

By the time he published "The End of the Innocence," Don Henley's name was as firmly established as that of a successful solo artist as it had previously come to be known as one of the driving forces behind the Eagles' almost decade-long success. Commercially his most successful album and critically his most acclaimed, his third solo release garnered a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocalist (for the title track) and produced several more hit singles besides "The End of the Innocence:" "The Heart of the Matter," "New York Minute," "How Bad Do You Want It?" and "Last Worthless Evening." Stylistically, the album ranges from ballads like the piano-driven title song (co-written by Bruce Hornsby, whose fingerprints are all over its instrumentation; not just in the keyboards but also in the saxophone solo, performed by Wayne Shorter, and in the song's main theme), "The Last Worthless Evening," and Don Henley's variation on the theme of forgiveness, "The Heart of the Matter" (a song that took him "42 years to write," as he explained during the opening show of the Eagles' "Hell Freezes Over" tour) - all the way to hard-rocking tunes like "I Will Not Go Quietly," featuring background vocals by Axl Rose. In between are the jazzy, introspective "New York Minute," yet another (percussion- and rhythm-driven) warning that the world "ain't no Shangri-La," the deceptively light-footed "Little Tin God," and no less than three hard, edgy songs rounding up Henley's damning verdict on Reaganomics ("How Bad Do You Want It?," "Gimme What You Got" and "If Dirt Were Dollars").

As were his previous solo albums, "The End of the Innocence" was co-produced and largely co-written by Danny Kortchmar, and likewise as on the previous albums, Henley enlisted the cooperation of a number of other outstanding musicians - in addition to Kortchmar, Hornsby, Shorter and Rose, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Julia and Maxine Waters, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch, Toto's David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, "inofficial Eagle" J.D. Souther, and many others. Except for his greatest hits album, 1995's "Actual Miles," this was also to be the last record Don Henley would publish on Geffen; a label he did not leave without a fight (which alongside the Eagles' reunion, his marriage and his preoccupation with the Walden Woods Project, he would later list as one of the reasons why he did not produce another new album in all of eleven years).

Henley is well-known to be a perfectionist and is sometimes criticized for allegedly overly "slick" productions; a statement usually going hand in hand with accusations of superficiality and occasionally even hypocrisy (his records did, after all, earn him millions; so how serious can he be about his social criticism?). But it doesn't even take a look at his efforts to preserve the environment (in the Walden Woods Project and elsewhere), his recently formed coalition for artists' rights, and his testimony before Congress on a variety of related topics to doubt the accuracy of that assessment. This guy means every word he writes; just listen to his lyrics - and as long as "we got the bully pulpit and the poisoned pen" and "this brave new world [is] gone bad again" ("If Dirt Were Dollars [we'd all be in the black]"), he'll be around to hold up a mirror before our eyes.

Superb - not surpassed until "Inside Job"
The progression which transformed the Eagles between their country-ish debut album and the final stunning "The Long Run" continued after the band split, so that, separately, the former band members have produced a body of work which far surpasses that of the Eagles as a band.

"The End of the Innocence" was yet another step forward for Don Henley, arguably the most talented former Eagle. Picking highlight tracks would be almost invidious, though "The Heart of the Matter" (and the title track) deserve special mentions even in this exalted company. Rocky, gritty, superbly produced, and with a lot to say, this is a "must-own". Yet Don Henley could - and, in 2000, DID - produce something even better.....

Best record ever?
I can`t praise this record highly enough,there`s not a duff track on it and there`s something for everybody,slow and deep meaning songs,The End Of tThe Innoncence and New York Minute and fast paced songs Like Gimme what you got and If Dirt Were Dollars,the guitar work on here is amazing and Don`s voice is great.