Eleven years is a long time to go between records. When Don Henley released his last solo effort, The End of the Innocence, in June 1989, there was no grunge, the Internet was in its infancy and Britney Spears was six years old. "That was a troublesome prospect for me when I set out to make this album," Henley admits, referring to his new Warner Bros. release, Inside Job. "I thought, 'My God, I'm in my fifties. Perhaps nobody will care.' "

Henley - fifty-two, a founding member of the Eagles and a multiplatinum solo artist - has gotten over those jitters. "I'm encouraged by the success of Carlos Santana," he says. "And I can't but feel, given what's on the radio right now, that there's a big void in music. There are 78 million baby boomers out there who don't have any music that chronicles their lives."

Three years in the making and co-produced by Henley with former Tom Petty drummer Stan Lynch, Inside Job is really two articulate, meticulously textured records in one. Songs like "Nobody Else in the World but You," "Workin' It" and "Damn It, Rose" are dark lampoons of superheated capitalism and shallow morality. There are also naked confessions of romantic need and marital fulfillment: "Taking You Home," "Everything Is Different Now," "My Thanksgiving." In 1995, Henley, a veteran bachelor, married Sharon Summerhall; the couple now has three children and lives near Dallas. Asked why he postponed family life for so long, Henley laughs. "I applied the same criteria to that," he says, "as I do to making records. Didn't want to do a bad job, didn't want to screw it up."

Born July 22nd, 1947, Henley grew up in the small east-Texas town of Linden. His father owned an auto-parts store; his mother was a teacher. Together they instilled in their son a love of literature and a respect for honest labor. In four hours of conversation over two days at a Los Angeles soundstage, where he is rehearsing for a summer tour to promote Inside Job, Henley often quotes William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau.

Henley also makes it clear that he did not spend the last eleven years on vacation. Besides touring with the reunited Eagles in 1994 and '95, he spent the Nineties raising money and awareness for Walden Woods and the Thoreau Institute in Concord, Massachusetts - environmental-education projects inspired by Thoreau's writings - and has been active in the preservation of redwood trees in California and the passage of clean-water legislation there. Henley is now rounding up fellow artists to fight a congressional amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act that would deem sound recordings to be works for hire, a designation threatening the intellectual-property rights of musicians.

Henley, who speaks in a thoughtful, measured Texas drawl that has survived his three decades of living in Southern California, does not flinch when questioned about the contradictions inherent in an affluent rock star's writing songs about amoral wealth and raging corporatization. Last year, The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 topped 26 million copies in sales, becoming the biggest-selling album in American recording history. But in "Damn It, Rose," Henley neatly skewers a pontificating pop god - and, by extension, himself: "We're being treated to the wisdom/Of some puffed-up little fart/Doing exactly what I used to do/Pretensions to anarchy and art."

"I could have called any of my albums Memos to Myself," Henley cracks. "I'm including myself in all this. I'm not perfect. But if someone thinks I'm being self-righteous, I regret that. I believe deeply in what I'm saying."

When did you start working on "Inside Job"?

I'm always absorbing material for songs and storing it in the dark corners of my tiny little mind. That process goes on whether I'm aware of it or not. So you could say the invisible work has been going on since 1989. The visible work started in the fall of 1997.

My songwriting process is rather random. Sometimes it starts with a title; sometimes it starts with a concept. Stan [Lynch] and I will pace around the room with coffee or a beer and philosophize about the concept for the song. Sometimes we started with loops, put chords on top of that - and then the chords would tell me what to write.

Is that why you go so long between records - you wait for the music to tell you where to go?

I have to wait for some of it. What's that show where Vanna White turns the letters?

"Wheel of Fortune."

Once enough of the letters are turned, I can solve the puzzle. I can sit down like a regular songwriter with a legal pad and a tape recorder and hammer out the rest of it. But I really love to write in the car.

How much of "Inside Job" came from driving around?

Eighty percent of it, mostly on Pacific Coast Highway. My studio is located fifteen, twenty miles up the coast. I would drive to the studio every morning with the cassette in the cassette player, then I would drive back late at night. It's amazing - things just come.

With the last song on the album, "My Thanksgiving," I had the first couple of lines: "A lot of things have happened/ Since the last time we spoke/Some of them are funny/Some of 'em ain't no joke." That's as far as I could get. That went on for a year and a half [laughs]. Then one night I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway, going home from the studio and, bam - "My Thanksgiving." I'd wanted to write a song called that for a long time.

Suddenly, my brain said, "Listen, moron, that works with this track. This is the song."

Pacific Coast Highway has been a magic spot for me for a long time. I wrote "Boys of Summer" there, up at Zuma Beach. Neil Young titled an album after it. I was there in the daytime, on the swings. I have very fond memories of my childhood: swinging in my backyard, looking out at my dad's cornfield, the dew sparkling on the corn. The swings on the beach are even better - you can face the ocean. And you can go right up to the sky - that weird feeling when you look up and your face goes up into the heavens.

There is an interesting duality to "Inside Job" - lushly textured songs about love and family mixed in with aggressively funny social commentary. The title of "Nobody Else in the World but You" suggests a song about fidelity. In fact, it's addressed to someone who is a selfish asshole.

We have reached an incredibly self-centered time in our history. One need only drive a few blocks in Los Angeles to witness acts of selfishness. And the way people behave in movie theaters - I can't go to the movies anymore. I get into fights. If there's one asshole in the entire theater, he sits directly behind me and yammers at the top of his lungs. I come from the South - I was raised to be polite, to say, "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am" to my elders. I was taught not to bump into people. But people will run over you in the supermarket and not even blink.

Selfishness is also manifest at the corporate level - this constant gobbling up of the competition, the rape and pillaging of natural resources for profit at a rate faster than the earth can replenish them. I worry about the kind of world my children will inherit. We have to get back to a balance between individual freedom and the concept of community.

How do you reconcile protesting the culture of greed in your songs with your own success and personal wealth? In a 1975 Eagles interview, you said, "Money was a much safer goal than adoration. They both drive you crazy, but if I'm going to blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it."

[Laughs] I remember that. I have done well. And I worked my ass off to get here. There are two things about wealth that are important: Did you come by it honestly? And what did you do with it after you got it? I have tried to give as good as I got. If I try to defend myself, I'll sound like I'm blowing my own horn. But I've made, and am still making, an effort to put something back. We all have an obligation to do that.