Don Henley said Joe Walsh should not be singing 'Life in the Fast Lane,' arguing that the song belonged to the man who helped write and sing it for the Eagles. Henley said Walsh wrote the opening guitar riff, but added: “That`s not his song to do.”

The blunt comment goes to the heart of a long-running split inside one of rock’s most durable bands. Henley and Glenn Frey helped form the Eagles in the 1970s, and Henley said he and Frey wrote 90 per cent of the song while he handled the vocal on the record. Walsh, who had his own solo career before joining the band, later took on the track anyway.

Henley’s objection was more than a passing jab. He said he did not understand why Walsh would not choose a song that was more his own, and then dismissed the performance with a dig at his voice: “Besides, he sounds like he`s got a clothespin on his nose.” The remark underlines how closely Henley still guarded the Eagles’ signature material, even as the band’s songs kept circulating on classic rock stations after the breakup.

That tension mattered because Henley had already been trying to distance himself from the band for a few years, even as he was becoming a star in his own right with “The Boys of Summer.” The Eagles’ catalog never really stopped moving. Classic rock radio kept the songs in heavy rotation, and that only made questions of ownership and identity sharper whenever one of the original players stepped forward to perform a familiar hit.

Glenn Frey once summed up the band as a group built on its ability to “kick some ass” whenever it played onstage, and Henley’s criticism shows how hard it was to keep that history neat once the lineup changed. Walsh was part of the Eagles’ story, but Henley’s point was simple: the singer who carried many of the band’s key songs thought this one still belonged to him. On that score, he left little room for debate.