J.D. Souther, the singer and songwriter who co-wrote twangy but debonair hits for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt that helped outline the Southern California country-rock sound of the mid-Nineteen Seventies, has died. He was 78.
His demise was confirmed by a consultant for the Eagles, who mentioned Souther died at his dwelling in New Mexico with out specifying a trigger or saying when he died. The musician was attributable to launch a tour subsequent week in Phoenix.
Souther — whose best-known songs included the Eagles’ “New Child in City” and “Heartache Tonight,” Ronstadt’s “Faithless Love” and his personal “You’re Solely Lonely,” which gave him a prime 10 pop hit in 1979 — was additionally an actor with roles on TV’s “Thirtysomething” and “Nashville” and in motion pictures together with “My Lady 2” and “Postcards From the Edge.” Among the many different acts who recorded his songs have been Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, George Strait and the Dixie Chicks.
In January, Souther carried out onstage with the Eagles at Inglewood’s Kia Discussion board, the place Don Henley launched him as a part of the “tightknit group of songwriters and singers” that he and the Eagles’ Glenn Frey would flip to within the ’70s “once we would get caught on a music or we’d attempt to begin some new materials.” He added that Souther was partially liable for three of the Eagles’ 5 No. 1 singles, which additionally included “Better of My Love,” a young, harmony-drenched ballad a couple of man “mendacity in mattress, holding you shut in my desires / Excited about all of the issues that we mentioned, and coming aside on the seams.”
John David Souther was born in Detroit however grew up in Amarillo, Texas, the place he performed jazz drums earlier than taking over the guitar. He moved to Los Angeles within the late ’60s and met Frey, with whom he fashioned the short-lived duo Longbranch Pennywhistle; the group constructed a following at West Hollywood’s Troubadour and launched a debut album in 1969 earlier than breaking apart the next yr.
Souther then launched a solo profession whereas Frey took a gig backing up Ronstadt, whom Souther was relationship; Henley joined Frey in Ronstadt’s band together with guitarist Bernie Leadon and bassist Randy Meisner, which laid the groundwork for the 4 ultimately to kind the Eagles. David Geffen, whose label Asylum issued the Eagles’ first LP in 1972, “kind of” requested Souther to affix the group, Souther advised The Instances in 2008.
“I thought of it, and we rehearsed a set and performed it for David [and Eagles managers] Elliot Roberts and Ron Stone on the Troubadour one afternoon,” Souther recalled. “Honestly, it took all of a minute afterward to say, no, the band was distinctive because it was, and I used to be fairly joyful to remain dwelling and write. I feel they have been relieved, as effectively.”
In 1973, Souther teamed with Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield to kind the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, which made a pair of well-regarded country-rock albums. Souther resumed his solo work with 1976’s “Black Rose,” which featured a duet with Ronstadt in “If You Have Crying Eyes,” and 1979’s “You’re Solely Lonely,” whose title observe topped Billboard’s adult-contemporary chart and went to No. 7 on the all-genre Sizzling 100.
James Taylor, left, and J.D. Souther carry out in Atlanta in 1981.
(Rick Diamond / Getty Pictures)
After 1984’s “Residence by Daybreak” did not match that industrial efficiency — the LP was “that unlucky curiosity that’s later referred to as a ‘vital success,’” he mentioned in a Instances interview in 1990, “that means no one purchased it” — Souther took a break from recording, discouraged partly by the music business’s rising reliance on MTV. “I wasn’t an enormous fan of music movies as a result of I assumed they inspired an extra of manufacturing versus an actual deal with the guts of the music,” he advised the New York Instances in 2012.
But as a songwriter he scored a success in 1989 with Henley’s MTV-approved “The Coronary heart of the Matter,” which he penned with the Eagles star and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. That very same yr he appeared in his first film, portraying a singer doing “Smoke Will get in Your Eyes” at a celebration in Steven Spielberg’s “All the time.”
A two-time Grammy nominee and a member of the Songwriters Corridor of Fame, Souther — whose survivors embody two sisters and a former spouse and her daughter — later moved to Nashville and returned to record-making in 2008 with the jazzy “If the World Was You,” which he rapidly adopted with a number of extra albums and a recurring half as a grizzled nation music fixer on ABC’s soapy “Nashville.”
Requested what impressed him to start out recording once more, he advised The Instances, “I in all probability give up making data as a result of I assumed that making data was making me loopy. Seems I used to be loopy anyway.”
