The classic chorus the Eagles got over the phone: “It’s great”
For any musician, there’s no real set pattern for where inspiration might come from. Whereas most songs tend to fall out of the sky with little rhyme or reason, it can sometimes take a conversation with a friend or spending some time out in the wilderness to get one’s mind racing for ideas for what the next song will sound like. But for the Eagles, it turned out that all they needed to make ‘Heartache Tonight’ was to get Bob Seger on the other end of the line.
But before they had even recorded a note of music for The Long Run, the California rockers were already pretty burned out. They had been riding the high of Hotel California for so long, and after all those years of hard work, they seemed to have exhausted themselves far too much coming off of their latest tour.
When they arrived at the studio, it was no surprise that no one had completed one song. If you think about it, the lifestyle of going from one hotel room to the next and trying your best not to lose your mind as you stay up well into the night isn’t exactly the best way of becoming inspired.
Looking back on it, it was almost a miracle that Timothy B Schmitt had the song ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ at his disposal. The group hadn’t even bothered thinking of any potential hits, but when the new guy came in with a sure-fire R&B hit, it was a no-brainer to work on that first to get the ball rolling.
But soul was far from the direction they wanted to go in. They had already made a staple of 1970s rock and roll, and they needed some ideas that would point the way to the future. Unfortunately, I don’t think that they had many, considering that some of the punk rip-offs like ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ are transparently below any of their usual standards for complex song topics.
Then again, that mentality works in the case of ‘Heartache Tonight’. The whole point of writing the song was that Glenn Frey wanted a song with a shuffle, and that meant calling up Seger for help. While Frey had known the heartland rocker from his days working in smaller acts in Detroit, Seger came through with the chorus over the phone.
As fellow songwriter JD Souther recalled from the session, “I think Glenn was on the phone with Seger, and he said, ‘I wanna run something by you,’ and sang it to him, and Seger just came right in with the chorus, just sang it and it was so good. Glenn called me and said, ‘Is four writers okay on this?’ And I said, ‘Sure, if it’s good.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great.’”
But when looking at the state of the Eagles at the time, it’s hard not to think about this being in some way about the group as well. Considering the group would fall out on tour when Frey and Don Felder got into a fight onstage, the line “Somebody’s gonna hurt someone before the night is through” became oddly prophetic.
Seger was never going to be thinking along those terms, though. Like the rest of us, he knew about his fair share of heartache, and being hung out to dry by your partner, as this song implies, is something that anyone can relate to.
