The title track, co-written by Henley and Bruce Hornsby, opens the album and dramatizes a fall from the pastoral ease of childhood and America's mythic past to a contemporary adult environment of power plays, betrayals and bellicosity. The song's mood of graceful melancholy is annihilated by the bluster of "How Bad Do You Want It?" and the defiant "I Will Not Go Quietly," on which Axl Rose delivers a spectacular background vocal.

"How Bad Do You Want It?" -- an attack on avarice -- finds an echo in "Gimme What You Got," which indicts America as "a nation of noses pressed up against the glass." Edie Brickell coos, "I want it, I want it," and the fusion of sexual desire and bottomless consumer need in that phrase displays Henley's deft analysis of how Americans are kept in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. "Little Tin God" and the bitterly funny "If Dirt Were Dollars" ("I was flyin' back from Lubbock/I saw Jesus on the plane/. . . . or maybe it was Elvis/You know, they kinda look the same") snipe at right-wing evangelists. But the album's high point comes with "The Heart of the Matter," the lush ballad with a ringing folk-rock guitar at its center that ends the album.

At the start of the song, the singer learns that a former lover has "found someone," and that emotional jolt sparks a remarkable series of reflections on love and its meaning in a person's life. "What are these voice outside love's open door/Make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?" the singer asks at one point. In the next verse, he admits, with a poignant weariness, "The trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness/They're the very things we kill, I guess."

In the swelling chorus, however, Henley sweeps up the themes of the song, and of the entire album, into a moving, touchingly tentative statement of human compassion. "I've been tryin' to get down to the heart of the marter/But my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter," he sings, and then concludes, "But I think it's about forgiveness." This generosity -- particularly coming from an artist who, in the past, too often allowed anger and condescension to betray his better nature -- makes "The Heart of the Matter" resonate even more deeply.

When innocence ends, responsibilities -- to ourselves, the people we love and lose, the world around us -- begin, Henley seems to be saying, and the album closes as the word "forgiveness" fades out. That isn't the message of uncompromised bliss proffered by our consumer culture and much adolescent rock & roll certainly, but it's the necessary, sad truth.