Jim Ed Norman, the Fort Myers, Florida native who wrote the orchestral parts heard on the Eagles’ Desperado, One of These Nights and Hotel California, turned 78 on Friday, October 16. Born Edward James Norman in 1948, he has worked in nearly every seat a record can be made from: keyboard player, string arranger, conductor, producer and, for two decades, the executive running Warner Bros. Records’ country operation in Nashville.
Most listeners know his work without knowing his name. That gap is the story of an arranger’s career, and Norman has talked about it himself. “When they see ‘arranged by,’ a lot of times, they don’t know that I’m the guy who arranged or wrote the part initially,” he said in a 2022 interview, given while he was on the road conducting the band’s Hotel California tour.
From a Denton apartment to a London studio
The connection to Don Henley started in Texas, not California. Norman was studying music at North Texas State University in Denton, the school now called the University of North Texas, when he walked into an apartment where Henley was playing records. By 1969 he had joined Henley’s group, Felicity, on keyboards and guitar. The band renamed itself Shiloh, moved to Los Angeles and made one self-titled album in 1970 with Kenny Rogers producing. It broke up in 1971, around the time Henley’s next band, the Eagles, was forming.
Henley and Glenn Frey called him in 1973. They were recording in London with producer Glyn Johns and wanted strings on a new ballad called “Desperado.” It was the first orchestral chart Norman had ever written. He has said he played the reel-to-reel copy the band mailed him for weeks before writing a note, and that he left the violas out entirely, using only violins, cellos and double basses to give the section more weight.
He also ended up conducting by accident. Seeing chairs and two microphones but no headphones in the studio, he asked Johns about it. “Well, yes, you’re going to conduct, aren’t you, mate?” Johns replied, by Norman’s account. “Well, I guess I am,” Norman answered.
The piece nobody asked for
The arrangement that gets the loudest reaction on tour is one he wrote unprompted. Moved by “Wasted Time,” the song that closed side one of Hotel California in 1976, he composed an orchestra-only reprise and offered it when a session finished early. The band recorded it, and it opened side two. “I was never asked to [compose] that,” he said in a 2022 interview with a Texas public radio station.
The Eagles work led to calls from other rooms. In the mid-1970s Norman arranged strings and horns for Linda Ronstadt’s Don’t Cry Now, wrote string parts for America’s Hat Trick and later scored Bob Seger’s 1978 hit “We’ve Got Tonite” and two Kim Carnes albums. He also played piano on “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Take It to the Limit.”
A Nashville career by the numbers
Production turned him toward country. His run with Canadian singer Anne Murray, which began in 1977, produced “You Needed Me,” a US No. 1 that won the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance, and the 1983 album A Little Good News, the first album by a solo female artist to win the Country Music Association’s album of the year.
Here is how the rest of his career lines up:
- 1983: joins Warner Bros. Nashville as head of A&R, then runs the division until 2004.
- Warner years: works with Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Travis Tritt, Faith Hill, Blake Shelton and Big & Rich; launches the Warner Western and Warner Discos imprints and a Progressive division that signed Take 6, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and Mark O’Connor.
- 2004 to 2010: moves to Hawaii and sets up a music business program linking the University of Hawaii with Belmont University in Nashville.
- 2012: joins Curb Records, later serving as its CEO; co-produces country singer Dylan Scott’s chart-topping “My Girl” (2016) and “Nobody” (2021).
- 2016: receives the Bob Kingsley Living Legend Award at the Grand Ole Opry House on February 24, with Henley among the performers.
- 2021: wins a Grammy for best roots gospel album as producer of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Celebrating Fisk!
Counted from 1983 to 2004, his Warner tenure ran 21 years, seven years longer than the 14 that separated joining Henley’s band in 1969 from his first day at the label.
Back in front of the orchestra
When Henley phoned about staging Hotel California in full with an orchestra and choir, Norman hesitated, then stepped away from the label work to lead the players himself. The tour stopped at Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena in November 2022, close to the campus where he first met Henley, with dates booked into spring 2023. He described the encore, which includes “Desperado,” as the moment the career comes back around. “Every night on tour, I get to hear the arrangement that started it all for me,” he said.
