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Hear the Track Don Henley’s Lawyers Told Okkervil River to Take Down

As previously reported, Don Henley of the Eagles, a band that’s spawned tribute bands, claims that an Okkervil River cover of one of his songs amounts to theft. Well, now you can hear the song his lawyers told the indie-folk group to remove from their free, streamin Golden Opportunties 3 cover mixtape late last year — Okkervil’s eerie version of “The End of Innocence.” Band boss Will Sheff has said that he chose that particular ’80s radio hit because it stood out from the Bette Midler ballads of the day with its “deflated masculine middle-aged world-weariness.” Henley wasn’t feeling the tribute in kind, however (he took swings at Frank Ocean too). 

“We simply had our legal team tell them to take it down and they got all huffy about it,” Henley said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. If “getting all huffy about it” means going ahead and streaming the track anyway (via Stereogum), Okkervil is are pretty much huffing and puffing the whole debate down to the ground. Sheff wrote an essay for Rolling Stone yesterday in which he argued that this copyright drama is actually “taking away something rich and beautiful that belonged to everyone in order to put more money into the hands of the small, lawyered few.”

Yup, Henley’s got attorneys, but Sheff and the rest of us have the internet: 

 

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