Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

by Steven Pressfield

Glenn Frey was the founding member of the Eagles along with Don Henley. He tells this story (I’m paraphrasing) in the documentary, History of the Eagles. I had moved to LA from Detroit. I was sharing a super-low-rent apartment in Silver Lake with J.D. Souther. We were struggling to establish ourselves as singers and songwriters. The apartment directly below us was Jackson Browne’s. He was as broke and unknown as we were. Frey describes how sound came up through the floor from Jackson Browne’s place to his. All day he could hear Jackson Browne working on songs. Browne would play a song on the piano once, twice, thirty times. He’d stop to make himself a cup of tea (Glenn could hear the whistling teapot), and then he’d go back to the piano and work on the song for another thirty passes, tweaking it and revising it little by little. I realized, This is how you write a song! Not