A Life Of Illusion

Joe Walsh, pouring his heart out

It basically means "Relax."

He speaks of confusion in life and of natural "disasters" that we seek to remedy, and we end of cornered in confusion with nowhere to go. If only we would relax and not worry about nature, just accept that some things must be, no matter how "horrible" we feel they are (mass death), they are part of nature keeping things in check.

... If we mess with it, we may live longer and have a higher population. But have you not heard that we "can't save them all." We need to accept that we are nothing more than any other animal and our time of extinction will come... Just relax and enjoy the ride, cause if you're not enjoying it, what the hell are you going through all this BS for?

Relax.

Y'know, I've known who Joe Walsh is since i was about 6, but I've never really listened to his solo stuff (apart from Rocky Mountain Way and Turn To Stone) - now there's all these great songs that I suddenly realise are his..

Not that it has anything to do with this song, but noone pulls off yellow/black polka-dot pants like Joe :D

This song is about accidentally getting your girlfriend pregnant.

The illusion is that there's a point to all the social climbing and effort that we go through to find love, when Nature is really just coming up with a way to get us to have babies.

POW right between the eyes. Oh How Nature loves her little surprises.

I would not be surprised if he wrote this song after meditating. It’s what I tend to conclude after such a session.

I have a very different interpretation of this song.

Most of this song was written in 1973, many years before it was finished and released. But something terrible happened to Joe in 1974, and I believe when he finally sat down to write the lyrics to this song, it was on his mind.

In 1974, Joe's eldest daughter was hit by a car and killed while on her way to pre-school. The strain led to the end of his marriage at the time. After his daughter's death, he felt like nothing at all mattered anymore, and everything he'd achieved up to that point was just a meaningless illusion of success.

So much of the lyrics seem to allude to the death of his daughter without ever actually saying so.

The first verse is stating his disillusionment, wishing that he could ignore it and just learn to accept where he's at in life, but he just can't. The second seems like the most direct reference to his daughter, an unexpected tragedy: POW! Right between the eyes. If you've ever lost the most important person in your life, suddenly and unexpectedly, you'd know that this is exactly how you feel like you just got punched in the face, by Mother Nature herself. And man can she HIT. Life punched him right between the eyes. It's not anything he can fix, it's just the way life goes sometimes, and there's nothing he can do about it, further adding to the idea that success and happiness are illusions to Joe, at the time.

But then the third verse seems to be telling us that there's no end to this feeling, and you simply have no choice but to learn to accept things that you can't fix, or you'll drive yourself nuts. Can't spend all your time looking for solutions that don't exist.

In the end, Joe had a plaque and a fountain installed in the Boulder CO park where his daughter used to enjoy playing. After his divorce, a few months after the accident, Joe started dating Stevie Nicks, and while their relationship was fraught with ALL-PRO levels cocaine abuse, she also found a way to open his heart again, and wrote "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For you?" to Walsh, which was an incredibly sweet and touching song (read the lyrics. Wow.) meant to tell him that she wasn't the only person in the world who loved him, and to convince him not to give up.

Unfortunately, their relationship was sunk by the coke, and one of the last times she spoke to him, she told him "don't come around here no more!" And she said that to him while Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics was in earshot, and he took that phrase and co-wrote a song with Tom Petty called, "Don't Come Around Here No More." But many years later, Nicks still referred to Walsh as "the love of her life."