All She Wants To Do Is Dance

Don Henley didn't write this song - Danny Kortchmar did. Kortchmar spent much of the '70s playing guitar and piano on seminal albums by James Taylor (Sweet Baby James, J.T.), Warren Zevon (Excitable Boy), and Carole King (Tapestry). When Henley launched his solo career, he tapped Kortchmar's talents not just a musician, but also as a songwriter. Songs they wrote together include "Dirty Laundry," "New York Minute" and "I Can't Stand Still." Kortchmar also wrote some songs on his own for Henley, becoming one of the few writers whose words the Eagles founder would put to tape. "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" is one of these completely Kortchmar compositions. In a 2013 Songfacts interview, Danny told us how it came together: "I had the groove and the music going. That record was made back when the technology had just started to really take over in music. I had one of the first Yamaha DX 7s, which was a keyboard that was used a ton in the '80s, but we ended up luckily getting one of the first ones in the United States. It's a synthesizer keyboard, and I used it to get that sound that you hear the record starting with. I was fooling around with that and created a track at home while we were making one of those albums. The next morning I woke up and wrote the whole lyric in about 20 minutes - wrote the whole thing. It came very easily. I can't really tell you the process, just that the music suggested to me what I wanted and then it just came out very quickly."

The '80s were a banner decade for Don Henley, formerly of the Eagles' fame, who in his solo career had eight charting Top 40 hits, and five of those made it into the Top-10. And that's just counting the Billboard Hot 100; when you count Adult Contemporary, Mainstream Rock, and Dance charts, Henley dominated half the decade. His second studio album Building the Perfect Beast spawned four charting singles, of which "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" is the second-highest. The song became a staple of Classic Rock radio and a favorite at Henley's concerts.

The song's writer Danny Kortchmar draws on classic literature for song inspiration. This one has two specific inspirations: 1) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) Says Kortchmar: "You've got this really rich couple that's oblivious to what's going on around them." 2) The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer (1958) Says Kortchmar: "A book about Americans coming into third-world countries and acting like they own the place."