This is Tiger Darrow, a beautiful young actress and musician who lives in New York City currently but who also has some strong Texas roots. For one, she was born in Dallas, lived in Austin, then back to Dallas, where she graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts. Tiger has also performed in Dallas, many times at the Kessler Theater.
This week, Tiger was interviewed by the Dallas Observer because, as a student at NYU, she studied under Glenn Frey, solo artist and member of the Eagles. Frey taught at NYU’s Steinhardt Department of Music and died early Monday at the age of 67.
She can’t remember exactly when she saw him alive last year, but she remembers it being an enjoyable lunch chat with fellow professors. “We all had some good chats,” Darrow says. “Just all super casual, catching up because we hadn’t seen each other since the year before. He was very perky. Very excited about his new place in New York, getting to spend time with his daughter who had just graduated.”
Darrow was a composition major and says Frey was brought in to the department to teach.
“He was just the most warm, welcoming person,” she says. “He would make sure to stick around and talk to students after the class. He wanted to get to know the students better and be really involved. We’d talk about songwriting and the importance of being able to get big ideas into small places. That was his whole philosophy behind songwriting: tell an entire story in such a small amount of time.”
Darrow says Frey’s technique was much more discussion and convo, not lecture; he didn’t tell students what to do, but rather opened dialogue.
Frey had received helpful advice when he got the Eagles together with Don Henley: keep writing songs and don’t fuss if they aren’t great. The more you write, the better the songs, to a degree. That was the roughly the same advice Frey gave to his students. “You have to write the crappy songs to get to the good ones,” Darrow says. “It’s practice. You practice it just like you practice an instrument.”
Sounds like writing a blog. By the way, Tiger Darrow is the grand-daughter of Dallas interior designer extraordinaire Sherry Hayslip of Hayslip Design Associates. Architect Cole Smith is her grandfather. Peyton Hayslip is her mother, and she has uncles and piles of relatives in creative services from painting and design to furniture making, moving and construction. I love how the apple never falls far from the tree, even in The Big Apple. The Hayslip/Smith family is one of the most creative families in Dallas.
Note: this post has been edited to reflect that Tiger was born in Dallas, not Austin, a fact I should know very well…
