(Editor’s Note: Don Henley Honored As MusiCare’s Person Of The Year on February 10, 2007)
MUSIC: Henley on Relationships
(Love Lost, Love Avoided, & Love Embraced)
by Shawn Murphy
Music is one of life’s most precious gifts. My half century love affair with her is a poorly kept secret among those who know me best and my passion for her intensifies with each passing year.
The reasons for music’s nearly universal appeal could easily fill volumes of books. Personally, I love the way at times she speaks a language that only my heart understands and feeds my soul in a way that other mediums cannot. The emotional power of both music and lyric in symphonic synergy has the power to move, to inspire and at times even provide healing to a wounded heart.
The most prolific songs ever penned from the Gershwin brothers to the brothers Gibb have most often centered around love relationships. From falling in love, to breaking up or even making up, its all been chronicled on literally millions of pages of sheet music.
One of so many of my generation who lyrically downloaded his own pleasure and pain into song is one of the co founders of arguably one of the most accomplished and beloved American bands of all time. The band is The Eagles. The man is Don Henley.
LOVE LOST
For so very many people in this culture who have loved and lost, been lost and found, or simply are just too afraid of pain to risk loving at all: his words provide expression, encouragement and catharsis in addition to priceless lessons regarding the greatest expression of life....love.
Perhaps one of the greatest anthems ever written for those of us who have survived the deep and festering wounds of divorce is his masterpiece called “The Heart of the Matter.”
Among the priceless gems found in nearly every stanza of this song are these...
There are people in your life who've come and gone
They let you down, you know they hurt your pride
You better put it all behind you baby; cause' life goes on
If you keep carryin' that anger, it'll eat you up inside, baby
I've been tryin' to get down
to the heart of the matter
Because the flesh will get weak
and the ashes will scatter
So I'm thinkin' about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore
Its a fact of life that we all must learn the hard way. We can’t truly live life in the fullness in which it was intended without freely giving and receiving love. Ironically, it is when we open ourselves up to love (the rose) that we open ourselves to its painful sidekick (the thorn) as well.
Forgiveness is essential to our own well-being. Bitterness is very much like acid, it eats away at and can ultimately destroy the vessel that harbors it.
The other reason that he champions forgiveness is because life is so short. “The flesh will get weak and the ashes will scatter” is clearly his poetic way of saying that life is much too brief, forgive one another, get over it, and to move on and endeavor to love again.
- 1st in a series of 3 -
