Here comes Henley to save us from ourselves

As a public service to time-strapped boomers, here's a quick summation of the lyrics on Don Henley 's long-awaited Inside Job, which arrives in stores next Tuesday: Things are bad. Getting worse. Wake up to the erosion of your soul. And don't forget to count your many blessings.

You'd think that after such a long absence, the famously prickly Eagles cofounder - whose last work, 1989's solo The End of the Innocence, sold about a gazillion copies - would ease back into the pool with a few unassuming love songs to remind people what it was they liked about him.

But that would be too easy, too escapist, for the high-minded Henley. By the time his first song, "Nobody Else in the World But You," hits the chorus, he's worked himself into a sanctimonious swivet, recycling a melody he's used before, to castigate everyone in cell-phone range for their self-centered myopia. The hectoring assault continues for more than an hour until, on the last song, our determined truth-seeker reaches the conclusion that "It's too long we've been living these unexamined lives. "

Henley has finally found his life's mission: He's going to rescue the world from its introspection deficit by assessing everything down to the lint on the bad guys' expensive suits with a steely, unsparing eye. Working tirelessly on our behalf, he's assembled a list of disturbing developments that he crams into songs that sound like policy papers from the Dudley Do-Right Think Tank. His concerns range from Oprah-ish notions about expressing daily gratitude to man's choking off of once-free-flowing rivers to the horrors of dot-com exploitation. He even suggests, in the pretzel logic of "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," that we're not benefiting from interaction with extraterrestrials because they're repelled by the tawdriness of lives fueled by Chicken McNuggets.

Eleven years meditating around the reflecting pool, working with the best musicians and gurus money can buy, and this is what he has to show for it?

A contrived grab bag of simpering ballads, white-boy funk and whiny screeds, Inside Job (Warner Bros. *) is the most muddled effort from a superstar since Eyes Wide Shut. It's riddled with the calculation that dooms so much big-budget rock - thundering anthems of high purpose, ham-fisted attempts to integrate hip-hop rhythms, and slavish re-creations of past glories. (Two songs come desperately close, in form and melody, to "The End of the Innocence. ")

Inside Job doesn't just ignore the example of graceful aging set by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and others, it tramples it. Instead of a concerned citizen, the 52-year-old Eagle comes off as a professional scold. Henley as gadfly? More like a greenhead fly.

He spends lots of energy trying to prove he's still righteously ticked off: On a pale "Life in the Fast Lane" update called "Workin' It," he complains: "We got the short-term gain, the long-term mess. We got the suffocating quarterly consciousness. " The title track goes even farther down the anticorporate road, using symphonic strings and a bombastic arrangement to shout down Big Brother privacy invaders who know "your mother's maiden name" and "what you've hidden in the mattress. "

When he's not furious, he's profoundly moved, a wanderer who has been saved by love. This sensitive-guy tack is almost as laughable as Henley's indignation: Where some artists - including, of all people, Madonna - have made compelling music from their personal transformations, Henley sounds as if he joined yoga class for social reasons. He uses all the right words but sounds disingenuous, and as his love-blubbering goes on, he contradicts himself. On "For My Wedding," Henley states he doesn't want "sentimental songs about thick and thin. " Naturally, the next song, "Everything Is Different Now," is a sappy song about thick and thin.

Oh, for the days when Henley's wheedling voice addressed less weighty themes. Now he's so committed to dispensing cultural criticism that he allows the music to run helter-skelter, trying in vain to appeal to as many tribes as possible. There's no guiding musical vision: Several tracks are basic one-chord funk vamps that cast the too-stiff Henley as soul man; others are utterly tuneless lectures disguised as ballads. "The Genie" starts off as an attempt at clanging-percussion hip-hop, but by the time it reaches the bridge, Henley has apparently lost interest and tosses in a meaningless, completely out-of-place Beach Boys-style harmony.

Its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production isn't the main problem with Inside Job, however; Henley's self-righteousness is. When, on "Damn It, Rose," he sneers at a smug MTV rebel, Henley doesn't just show his age. He reveals his loathing for everything that has pushed him and the Eagles from MTV to VH1 to, in just a few weeks, VH1 Classic. "We're being treated to the wisdom of some puffed up little fart," he sings with contempt. "Doing exactly what I used to do, pretensions to anarchy and art. "

Anarchy? Really? It's hard to remember any calls for revolution buried beneath the surface of Henley's idealized SoCal soft rock. And this time the art has gone south, too. That MTV smart aleck may be the latest in a long line of agitators with a logo on his back, but it's a safe bet he offers something more compelling than the chorus of "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," which finds Henley breathlessly advising his listeners that it's "a cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold post-post-modern world. "

Thanks for the alert, Don. We can now consider ourselves properly warned.