All She Wants To Do Is Dance Sunset Grill Don Henley

All She Wants To Do Is Dance Album: Building The Perfect Beast (1984)
Sunset Grill Album: Building The Perfect Beast (1984)
by Don Henley

Don Henley didn't write All She Wants To Do Is Dance - 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 interview, Danny told 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.

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."
This is one of these songs that has been endlessly analyzed, but came very quickly for the writer. Kortchmar says he wasn't thinking very hard about the song when he wrote it - it "just came out."

What came out, however, were some very introspective words that stand in contrast to a deliciously danceable tune. The lyrics are often interpreted as a critical observation of the rebel side of youth culture in America - kids more interested in partying than in their professed aims to change the world. The mid-Reagan years were seen as a period where - to twist an old metaphor - Rome fiddled while Nero burned. If this line of critique of social movements sounds familiar, you've probably heard the same thing said of every generation's protest movements from the 1960s' Yippies to the 2000s' 4chan's Anonymous.

Dwelling a bit further on the lyrics: A "Molotov cocktail" is a kind of homemade fire-bomb. One popular recipe (and we're not telling you anything you can't find out in a hundred other websites out there) is gasoline mixed with melted styrofoam in a milk jug, with a gas-soaked rag shoved through the cap as a fuse. Light it and throw. Dozens of variants on ingredients exist. Excellent examples are on display in any evening news broadcast whenever some third-world country is having a bit of civil unrest.

Don Henley wrote Sunset Grill with guitarist Danny Kortchmar and keyboard player Benmont Tench. Kortchmar, who played on popular albums by Carole King, Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon, was a key contributor to Henley's first three solo albums, co-writing and producing many of the tracks. Tench is a member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - he has also written songs with Lone Justice ("Sweet, Sweet Baby") and Hal Ketchum ("Stay Forever").

The Sunset Grill is a real place and a favorite spot for Henley. Located on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, it's a place where Henley could see how everyday people interact, which isn't always easy to do when you're a celebrity in LA.

Henley had the title and lyrical theme in mind for this song, but needed the right music to go with it. As he did with "New York Minute," Danny Kortchmar came up with a tune that he thought fit what Henley had in mind, and they hashed out the song from there.

Sunset Grill is about more than just a hamburger joint. In an interview with Danny Kortchmar, he explained: "Sunset Grill is a real hamburger place on Sunset Boulevard that Don used to go to. He admired the fact that the same family and the same people had run it for many years, and that the burgers were made with love - they were everything he liked about American society. So he used that Sunset Grill as a metaphor for what he liked, what he thought was great about society. And then he also used it to describe what he didn't like, which is plenty."

What Henley didn't like is the vapid commercialism and duplicity that was so common around Hollywood. In many ways, the song answers the question many denizens of Los Angeles ask: "why do we live here?" The answer is found in the last line of the song: "all our friends are here."

FLCL (Japanese: フリクリ, Hepburn: FURI KURI, pronounced in English as FOOLY COOLY) is an original video animation (OVA) anime series created and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, written by Yōji Enokido, and produced by the FLCL Production Committee, which consisted of Gainax, Production I.G, and King Records. FLCL is a story following Naota Nandaba, a twelve-year-old boy whose suburban life is disturbed by the arrival of the mysterious Haruko Haruhara. The six-episode series was released in Japan from April 2000 to March 2001 alongside a manga and novel adaptation.

In 2016, two new seasons totaling 12 episodes were announced as a co-production between Production I.G, Toho, and Adult Swim. The second season, FLCL Progressive, premiered on June 3, 2018 on Adult Swim's Toonami programming block, while the third season, FLCL Alternative, premiered on September 8, 2018. In Japan, Alternative and Progressive had theatrical screenings as compilation films with Alternative opening on September 7, 2018 and Progressive opening on September 28, 2018. The first episode of FLCL Alternative premiered unannounced on April Fools' Day 2018 at 12 a.m. ET on Toonami in Japanese with English subtitles as part of Adult Swim's annual stunt. Two additional seasons were ordered by Adult Swim in 2022, titled FLCL: Grunge and FLCL: Shoegaze, respectively. Both seasons premiered in Northern America in 2023.

The first season of FLCL is a coming-of-age story and revolves around Naota Nandaba, a 12-year-old, working-class boy living with his widower father and grandfather. His life in the Japanese city of Mabase is interrupted by the arrival of a Vespa-riding maniac named Haruko Haruhara. She runs over Naota then revives him with CPR before hitting him on the head with her left-handed, electric bass guitar (a blue, vintage Rickenbacker 4001) and proceeds to stalk him. Finding Haruko weaseling her way into his life as a live-in maid, Naota discovers that the head injury she caused created an "N.O." portal, which giant robots produced by a company known as Medical Mechanica emerge from periodically. The first of these robots is hit on the head by Haruko and becomes a friendly service robot later named Canti. Canti ingests Naota to assume the reddened form he first had when fighting the robots sent after him.

The six-episode series was released in Japan from April 26, 2000 – March 16, 2001. It originally debuted in the United States on Adult Swim in August 2003, where it managed to gain a significant cult following and was widely acclaimed, despite its short length. The series would continue to air on the network in the following years, including reruns on the network's Toonami programming block from October 2013 to January 2014, and in April 2018. The series is also available via iTunes, adultswim.com and Funimation's website.

Six DVD compilations, each containing one episode, have been released in Japan by Gainax. In addition, a DVD collection box, containing all six DVD compilations, was released in Japan on August 13, 2005. Three DVD compilations were released by Synch-Point in North America. A DVD collection box, containing all the DVD compilations of the English episodes, was released on January 23, 2007, but have since gone out of print. In January 2010, Funimation announced that they had acquired the license for the series and would be releasing it on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in February 2011. Shortly after, it has been released in Australia and New Zealand by Madman Entertainment on a 3-disc DVD set and on Blu-ray Disc. It is also licensed in the United Kingdom by MVM Films. The series also aired in the United States on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block from August 4 to August 13, 2003.