The “beautiful” song Glenn Frey needed to sound perfect: “Such a great player”
What made Eagles sound so great was the dichotomy of listening to Glenn Frey and Don Henley whenever they played together.
They were meant for each other in many respects whenever they started working together, but whereas Henley was the one who was trying to make everything sound perfect, no one managed to make one of the biggest bands in the world seem like the most carefree job in the world like Frey could, especially when working on tunes like ‘Take It Easy’. But the more time passed, the harder it was going to be for them to equal the magic all over again.
They had already been at a disadvantage ever since Desperado wasn’t the runaway success that they wanted it to be, but Hotel California was different. This was the sound of a band at the peak of their powers and Frey and Henley finishing each other’s sentences to a certain degree, but when you have a record that big, where else can you go but down when you start looking at the rest of your work?
No one could have imagined putting in that much effort on one record, but Frey felt that there was at least a little bit more gas in the tank after the band broke up. Hell Freezes Over was their excuse to relive the glory days all over again, but Frey wasn’t going to abandon the music he was doing on the side, either. He liked the idea of moving onto different ideas, and with a voice as weathered as his was, he figured his later years were a good time to start getting back into old standards.
After Hours was bound to be considered a vanity project by many, but Frey actually manages to pull it off better than you’d imagine. No one thought that he was going to be the next Tony Bennett or anything, but when you look at the way that he approaches a lot of those classic tunes, you can tell that he has a certain reverence for the way that those songs were constructed back in the day.
There are still some clear rock and roll tunes on the record that have been sweetened up a bit, but a lot of the best stuff on the record involves him digging deeper into the Great American Songbook. Linda Ronstadt had already pioneered pop stars making moves like this, but Frey figured that doing justice to someone like Nat King Cole was almost beyond the realm of good taste when doing his version of ‘For Sentimental Reasons’.
Plenty of artists have tried their hand at doing this tune, but Frey knew that Cole was never going to be matched, saying, “It’s a beautiful song, and I really wanted to stay close to Nat King Cole’s original version, which was perfect. He was such a great piano player and an effortless singer. It was an honour to be able to do this song. You can’t try to be Nat King Cole, so you have to just try to be yourself.”
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And that’s the same mentality that Frey put into his cover songs with the Eagles as well. Doing a faithful version of Tom Waits’s ‘Ol’ 55’ would have either been interesting or hilarious, depending on which member was singing, so the most that Frey could hope to do was lend his softer voice to any one of those songs and see where it would take him.
And while he wasn’t going to have a higher calling being a lounge singer or anything like that, After Hours does have a decent track record for being one of the few standards albums by a rock and roll star that isn’t embarrassing. This was simply where Frey felt the most comfortable, and you can hear him having the time of his life even without those beautiful harmonies behind him.
