The songwriter who penned hits for the Eagles
JD Souther helped shape the Southern California country rock sound of the 1970s. Part of a group of singer-songwriters who lived, partied, and wrote together in the Hollywood Hills, the low-key Texan wrote or co-wrote songs recorded by his onetime girlfriend Linda Ronstadt (“Faithless Love”), Bonnie Raitt (“Run Like a Thief”), and James Taylor (“Her Town Too,” recorded as a duet with Souther). He was best known, though, for co-writing some of the biggest hits by the Eagles—to whom he was so closely tied he appeared on the back of their 1973 album Desperado—including “The Best of My Love,” “Victim of Love,” and “New Kid in Town.” Souther’s own recordings met with no such success, but he said he didn’t covet fame. “People would say to me, ‘Doesn’t it piss you off that the Eagles have these big hits off your songs?’” he said in 2019. “I would usually start saying, ‘Would you like to see the checks?’”
John David Souther grew up “immersed in music,” in Amarillo, Texas, said The Washington Post. His father was a former big-band singer who ran a music store, and while working there Souther learned the violin, clarinet, piano, and drums. He briefly attended college, but left to perform with a band that relocated to Los Angeles. There he fell in with future Eagle Glenn Frey, said The Telegraph (U.K.). The pair haunted the Troubadour—a “dark and smoky” nightclub Souther called his “university”—and started the short-lived band Longbranch Pennywhistle. They “amassed a loyal following” and recorded a 1969 album before Frey moved on to form the Eagles.
Souther scored a No. 7 hit with “You’re Only Lonely” in 1979, said Variety. But after a 1984 album whiffed, he took a long hiatus, longing to “step off the hamster wheel.” In 1989, he launched an “unexpected career as an actor,” appearing in five episodes of the TV series Thirtysomething; small film roles and a recurring role as a veteran music producer on ABC’s Nashville followed. In 2008, he “finally returned to making records” with the jazzy If the World Was You and two more albums. He reflected with gratitude on his early career and the cauldron of creativity he’d found in Los Angeles. “The common denominator is that we were all hungry at the same time,” he said in 2011. “We tried to write songs that we felt would last a long time.” |