JD Souther, singer who co-wrote Eagles classics like ‘New Kid in Town,’ dies at 78

Souther enjoyed an unexpected career as an actor in television and film, starting with a role on the prime-time series “Thirtysomething” in 1989. He subsequently was best known for appearing on the first season of “Nashville” in 2012, with his other parts including small roles in the films “Postcards From the Edge,” “Always,” “Purgatory,” “Deadline” and “My Girl 2.”

“The acting stuff came because someone asked me,” he said in an interview with Acoustic Storm. “I acted when I was a kid… in high school and college. I never thought of it much in L.A., although anybody who likes movies fantasizes about being in them. But great people asked me to be in their movies. Steven Spielberg asked me to be in a movie, Ed Zwick asked me to do this arc of episodes on ‘Thirtysomething’ and Mike Nichols asked me to be in ‘Postcards From the Edge.’ There’s absolutely no reason to say no to people of that quality when they ask you to be in their films. I had an agent, but I don’t know that I really read for any of those roles. I may have read for the one in ‘Thirtysomething,’ although I think Ed just wanted me to do it. I think I read a page or two. I left and then my agent called and she asked me how I did. I said, ‘I sucked, it was terrible.’ She said, ‘That’s funny, because just you got the part.’ So much for self-evaluation.”

Souther was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013.

His collaborations with the Eagles followed a short-lived band that Souther was actually in with Glenn Frey, Longbranch Pennywhistle, which released one self-titled album in 1969, which Souther did not hold in high regard.

As a solo recording artist, he was not prolific, but he started out with a burst of albums as part of David Geffen’s Asylum Records stable — starting with 1972’s “John David Souther,” the debut LP that included the future Eagles cut “How Long.” That was the last time he went by his full name, preferring thereafter to use initials, saying, “It started with me turning in songs as JD Souther in ’71. I had seen the J.S. Bach music, first in books and then at the British Museum, and as there was no higher music for me to aspire to. I adopted the abbreviation.”

One interruption in his early solo career came when he, Chris Hillman and Richie Furay were corralled to form a supergroup, the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, which fell apart after two mid-’70s albums went almost instantly to the cutout bins. 

In an interview in the 2010s with this writer, Souther spoke about how he became a sort of icon of country-rock — ironically, to him, since he had grown up listening to jazz, classical and anything but country. “We were all very much in the sway of the interface between rock ‘n’ roll and country music at the time. In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, everybody was listening to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. The group of guys that were before me — CSN, the Byrds, Dillard and Clark, Poco, the Burrito Brothers and all those guys — had pretty well integrated rock ‘&’n’ roll and country music into this really formidable sound. Linda and I were together, and she played me a lot of country music that I had never heard before. In fact, I just realized that there’s one little thing I do with my voice at the end of lines, and it kind of irritates me that I just can’t seem to help doing it. I was thinking it was something left over from what we were doing in the ‘70s, but I realized it’s something I heard on a Louvin Brothers record, and it just stuck, somewhere in my muscle memory. My voice just does that—a little tiny ghost of a yodel at the end of some lines. I never mean to do it, but it won’t go away!”

Of the scene at the time, he told this writer, “The fact that the music we made was considered to be its own genre — Southern California rock or whatever — wasn’t intentional. First of all, because there were no true southern Californians in that group except Jackson Browne, and he was from Orange County. Glenn is from Detroit, Henley’s from Texas, I’m from Texas, Linda’s from Arizona, Waddy (Wachtel) was from New York, Kooch (Danny Kortchmar) was from New York, James (Taylor) was from outside Boston, and Warren Zevon was from Mars. It was a really incredibly diverse bunch of people that moved there from everywhere else. The common denominator is that we were all hungry at the same time. We were all playing these open-mic nights at the Troubadour, hoot nights, and we became friends and had a real shared ethic about music being good, and about its being good being more important than it being temporarily popular. We tried to write songs that we felt would last a long time. At least that was my motivation.

“There was nothing flippant about what any of us were writing,” he continued. “The group that was hanging out was Don and Glenn and Jackson and Zevon and me and Linda — who, even though she didn’t write, played a huge part in that, because she was such a good ear. She really chose the best of all of our songs to record. She’s just smart as a whip and had a great ear for songs and for what she could sing. And Judee Sill, who doesn’t get mentioned much, because she never sold a lot of records and she died a while ago, but she was very much in my group of friends, too. All those people were just really serious about music. There was some friendly competition about it, even though we were all definitely on each other’s side. Everybody wanted to show up with something that made all the rest of us go, ‘Wow! I wish I had thought of that.’”

As the ill-fated Souther-Hillman-Furay Band wound down, he resumed solo work for Asylum with the 1976 album “Black Rose,” then moved to Columbia for 1979’s “You’re Only Lonely” and 1984’s “Home by Dawn.” 

Following that, he took a 24-year release from record-making, preferring life in the home he had built for himself in the Hollywood Hills, and ski trips to New England or retreats in Japan, to continuing to work in the music industry. “It was paradise. Life was as peaceful as I had known it since I was a child in Wellington, Texas, but I knew I would have to go back to work sometime.”

He finally returned to making records in 2008 with “If the World Was You,” an album recorded with a jazz ensemble. He followed it up in 2011 with “Natural History,” a release made up mostly of his own new recordings of songs that had been hits for the Eagles and Ronstadt. “Tenderness,” a collection of all-new material, followed in 2015. It was his final album release, though he continued to tour in the following years, up until his death.

In a 2018 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Souther said that he was still friendly with most of his superstar collaborators. “I’m very close to (Ronstadt). I’m still very close to Jackson (Browne); I talk to him all the time,” he told the newspaper. “Don and I keep sending each other the same silly emails we always have. Probably the person I saw the least of the last few years, to my regret, was Glenn. It hit us all very hard that he died. I was his first partner, he was my first songwriting partner and best friend. When we were just babies we did a lot of really crazy stuff for no money, just for anyone who would let us play.”

He said that he’d nearly become a member of the Eagles when the group was being formed, but was the first to realize his inclusion wouldn’t work after one tryout with him in the lineup. “I think I was in the band for one day. David Geffen thought it that would be ‘four songwriters, good; five songwriters better.’ So we put together a set and played it at the Troubadour in the afternoon for the management team. I just remember them looking down the front line and seeing four of us bashing away at stringed instruments. And, to be frank, they didn’t need me. They were a perfectly well-rounded, self-contained band. I figured we were going to keep writing together anyway, so I think we all got the best of that situation, the best possible outcome. Frankly, when I said, ‘No, I don’t think I really want to be in the band,’ I’ve never seen four guys more relieved. I think they were more delighted than I was.”

Souther said that there was no strict division of duties when he co-wrote with Frey and Henley. “Usually all three of us are writing all lyrics and music,” he told Acoustic Storm in an interview. “’New Kid in Town’ is probably a bit different because I had the chorus done for almost a year before I showed it to Glenn and Don. … It’s always a joint effort. I can’t speak for them, but as much music as I had in my background, it was mostly jazz and orchestral music. I wasn’t exposed to country music until I was almost grown.” Although he admitted he generally preferred to write by himself, he was more than willing to make an exception for these all-stars. “(Writing as a team) speeds things up a lot,” he said. “When you’re writing with good writers like Jackson or Warren Zevon or Don and Glenn, you’re so critical of each other that you don’t let anything pass that doesn’t feel like it’s A+.”

In a conversation with the Creative Independent, Souther — who had moved to Nashville — said, “Glenn Frey had been living in New York for a few years when he died. And Don Henley lives in Texas and Linda lives in San Francisco. We’re all sort of spread out to the far corners anyway. But yes, that period of time was probably unique. Now, I keep meeting young musicians who will say to me, ‘God, I wish I lived in California in the ’70s, it must have been so cool.’ To us, it was just everyday life. Also, we were all pretty fiercely competitive, particularly Frey and Henley and myself.”

His closeness with Ronstadt lasted through the years. When he was releasing his final album in 2015, he told the Arizona Republic, “She’s always the first to hear a new album. She’s the greatest listener: an astute, well-read woman, as well as musical… She’s a very thoughtful person, spontaneous and funny… Every time I hear Linda Ronstadt’s voice with my words and melodies, I just melt. It was a privilege to be her painter and also her musical partner.”

Souther dated not only Ronstadt but Stevie Nicks and Judee Sill, who was said to have written “Jesus Is a Crossmaker” about him. But he was not up for revealing too much about how those relationships or others affected his lyrics, though he did concede his final 2015 album reflected his divorce. “Faulkner said all fiction is autobiographical. But I wouldn’t tell you what,” he said. “I don’t talk about my personal life anyway. There’s a very thin line between my life and fiction, but I’m not going to be one to say where it is.”

He was comfortable with his level of renown. Henley, he said, is “being paid really well to be on the road in Europe with the Eagles, and I’m being paid less well to sit here on my farm and watch my dogs run around in the field. But I don’t know how I would deal with it the other way around. I always try to be grateful. My father was very insistent on having good manners when people approached me or complimented me or something. But I like the fact that I don’t get made up before I go out of the house or check to be sure my hair looks great. I’ve got on these beat-up old boots right now and some Levi’s with a hole in the knee. I don’t really want to be stopped when I’m in the grocery store and have somebody pay a bunch of attention to me. I’ll be nice if that happens, but it’s not what I want.”

Souther performed for his biggest audience in years this past January when he joined the Eagles at one of their shows at L.A.’s Kia Forum. “What an absolute joy,” he posted on Facebook, “performing these songs written with my best pals and now standing next to Don singing ‘Best of My Love’ with him 50 years after it was number one. It’s impossible to wipe the smile off my face. Huge thanks to them and to all of you.”

Souther is survived by his two sisters and his former wife and her daughter. Donations in JD’s honor can be made to Best Friends Animal Society, an organization that was very important to him.