The Eagles’ 1974 song about being “typical, frustrated young men”
Although the Eagles might represent the pinnacle of rock and roll excess to some, they were actually one of the most self-aware bands of their era. Even their definitive hit ‘Hotel California’ is much more than the supposed homage to the carefree lifestyle of the rich and famous in Los Angeles.
The band’s songwriters often turned their self-aware gaze on the Eagles themselves, which produced great acrimony, a crucial part of their story.
Famously, in the 2013 documentary The History of The Eagles, Glenn Frey noted Don Felder’s vocal shortcomings, despite his talent as a guitarist, as an ongoing issue in the band. “Don Felder, for all of his talents as a guitar player, was not a singer,” he said. The group’s drummer and fellow songwriter Don Henley agreed, asserting that it “simply did not come up to band standards”.
Outside of the personal attacks, though, one of the finest songs that they used to comment on themselves is ‘The Best Of My Love’ taken from the 1974 record On the Border. Written by Frey, Henley and JD Souther, the easy-listening classic was so effective that it became the group’s first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1975.
According to Frey, he devised the memorable guitar melody when figuring out a folk tuning that his girlfriend of the time, Joni Mitchell, had shown him. However, he ultimately put his six-string in a completely different tuning to create the sound he captured on ‘The Best of My Love’. That, in tandem with the universally applicable lyrics that apparently posit it as a breakup song, such as “you see it your way, and I see it mine, and we both see it slipping away”, saw it climb to the top of the chart.
Part of the song’s enduring appeal lies in that ambiguity. Almost everyone has experienced a relationship drifting in different directions, which made it easy for listeners to project their own stories onto the lyrics. The Eagles rarely dealt in straightforward love songs, preferring to leave just enough room for interpretation. That approach meant tracks like ‘The Best of My Love’ could feel deeply personal without ever becoming tied to one specific moment or one specific person.
In the years since the song’s release, Henley, who sings the lead, said he, Frey and Souther wrote the lyrics when drinking one evening at the Los Angeles restaurant Dana Tana’s, which the band frequented. Although it might seem a touch creepy through today’s lens, when huddled at their table, the trio studied women and relationships, as, according to Henley, they were “typical, frustrated, young men” at the time. It is this sentiment that underpins the song, not breakups.
That honesty was always one of Henley’s greatest strengths as a lyricist. Rather than pretending to have all the answers, he often wrote about flawed people trying to make sense of complicated emotions, a theme that would continue throughout the Eagles’ catalogue. It also explains why so many of the band’s songs have endured.
Notably, in 1977, the disco group The Emotions also hit number one in the United States with ‘Best of My Love’. This was the first time two different tracks with the same name had climbed to the top of the charts.
Listen to ‘The Best of My Love’ below.
