J. D. Souther in Lincoln Center American Songbook The composer J. D. Souther in the Allen Room as part of the Lincoln Center American Songbook series. He performed songs identified with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, along with new works. "Too many stories, too many heartbreak songs/ Where nobody's right, nobody's wrong," go the words to "Faithless Love," the aching country-rock ballad popularized by Linda Ronstadt 38 years ago in a memorable duet with its composer, J. D. Souther. On Friday evening Mr. Souther sang a solo rendition of "Faithless Love" at the Allen Room as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. With its plaintive winding melody and lyrics that picture an endless river of romantic sorrow, the song conjures the darker side of Southern California hedonism during the long-gone heyday of the Laurel Canyon troubadours. Disenchantment also runs through Mr. Souther's collaborations with the Eagles, including "New Kid in Town," "The Sad Cafe," "The Best of My Love" and "Heartache Tonight," all of which he performed with a group that included Rod McGaha on trumpet, Chris Walters on piano, Evan Cobb on saxophone and Byron Isaacs on bass. Mr. Souther, 66, is a wiry, tense performer with a distant resemblance to Clint Eastwood. If his best melodies, like "Faithless Love" and "You're Only Lonely," evoke "Red River Valley" channeled through Roy Orbison, to hear them sung by Mr. Souther in a naked, scraggly voice instead of the sweet crooning tenor of the Eagles" Don Henley was to rediscover the bitterness at their core. The songs describe a culture's ingrown, competitive, gossipy, hypersexual, cocaine-ridden ethos at the moment when its dreams began to sour. In performances of more recent songs, like the salsa-flavored "Journey Down the Nile" (dedicated to the writer Christopher Hitchens), Mr. Souther showed how he had branched out into a more surreal songwriting mode. Besides salsa, the band brought in echoes of light jazz and mariachi with Mr. McGaha's trumpet the distinguishing sound in an ensemble whose instrumentation sometimes strayed out of tune. The set was interspersed with a few standards, including a slowed-up "Bye Bye Blackbird," a decidedly unjolly "Ain't Misbehavin" " and a version of "For All We Know," that with a minor lyrical adjustment made it an emphatically final farewell song.