Cass County (album)

Background

In June 2015, Don Henley spoke about recording the album in Nashville, Tennessee, saying: "The great majority [of recording] was done right here in Nashville and I can truthfully say that I enjoyed making this record more than any record I've made in my career. And a lot of the reason is because of the people who participated. There's some amazing musicians here and the best thing about it is, most of them are funny. So it was a real pleasure."

The album is named after the East Texas county where Henley grew up.

Critical reception

Upon its release, Cass County received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 72 based on 9 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". David Fricke of Rolling Stone said, "Written and produced with Stan Lynch, the original drummer in Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, Cass County is meticulously crafted, sharply written and absolutely free of neo-country additives like reheated Seventies-rock bombast and Twitter-verse vernacular." Dave Heaton of PopMatters stated, "At the album’s best, Henley conjures up the push-pull between restlessness and contentment in a way that jibes well with the musical interest in the traditions of the genre. At its worst, the album makes me want to throw it out the window, either for the cliches or more often the way the persona of the album comes from a lecturing place of “wisdom”; an I’ve-lived, so I know attitude." Jon Caramanica of The New York Times said, "The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on The End of the Innocence, his excellent 1989 album."

Commercial performance

The album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top Country Albums on its release. It was also the top selling album of the week, with 87,000 copies of pure albums sold in the United States. The album has sold 259,400 copies in the US as of August 2016.