Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits

Album Review

Although it is drawn from only three albums (with only one track, "Dirty Laundry," from I Can't Stand Still), Actual Miles was a well-chosen best-of from an artist who had enjoyed just enough hits to justify one. Five tracks each came from Building the Perfect Beast and The End of the Innocence, and they included all of Don Henley's Top 40 hits. The album was filled out with a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and two new tracks, among them the ambitious "The Garden of Allah," which seemed to be an attempt to create a new allegorical masterpiece along the lines of "Hotel California," but managed to be only pretentious. Still, the bulk of this album was the sound of AOR radio in the mid-'80s. That, of course, was the catch — this album should have come out about four years before it did, and probably would have if Henley hadn't been suing Geffen Records. Though destined to be a successful catalog item, in 1995 it was more a historical artifact than a major release.