“Definitely not country rock”: the Eagles song that defies genre
The entire Los Angeles rock scene seemed bathed in sunshine as soon as it came on the radio. As much as people claim that there’s a diversity to the sounds of California, it’s a lot easier to tell when someone’s from the sunny side of the US compared to the street-wise sounds of New York rock and roll. But as much as the Eagles defined what California meant to many people, they weren’t meant to be restricted to that kind of sound for the rest of their lives.
After all, they had all come from different parts of the country and made their way to California to make it. Glenn Frey had been from Detroit, Don Felder had come all the way from Florida to see what the West Coast looked like, and Don Henley had grown up in a small town in Texas, so it wasn’t like they all knew firsthand what it was like to walk along Santa Monica when they first started playing their instruments.
But when they started making music indebted to country, it didn’t take fans long to throw that tag on them. Desperado was the kind of album that wouldn’t have felt out of place net to the Johnny Cashs and the Waylon Jennings of the world, but after Henley and Frey started branching out, they wanted to make sure that they could write something that didn’t have their audience donning cowboy hats and investing in a pair of boots.
To them, they represented all types of American music, which meant trying out different sounds on every album. Sure, Bernie Leadon may have kept them rooted to country music during the first half of their career, but by the time Joe Walsh joined the band for Hotel California, it felt like every other song on the record had a different tone to it, whether that was them making something mellow like ‘New Kid In Town’ or embracing rock and roll on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’.
Every song still had that authenticity that Frey and Henley brought to the sessions, but there was something different about ‘Wasted Time’. Henley had sung showstopping songs in his life like ‘Desperado’, but compared to whatever the rest of the band had done before, this was the kind of turn into soul and R&B that no one could have anticipated.
And according to Frey, this was the moment they finally waved goodbye to country rock, saying, “We did a big Philly-type production with strings — definitely not country rock. You’re not going to find that track on a Crosby, Stills & Nash record or Beach Boys record. Don’s singing abilities stretched so many of our boundaries. He could sing the phone book. It didn’t matter.” It was a departure, but it wouldn’t really be felt until the next record.
The Long Run was definitely a more straightahead record than everything else they had been working on, but a song with as much groove as ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ feels like a logical extension of what the band were doing before, only this time with the soaring voice of Timothy B Schmit behind the microphone. And once they ventured into their respective solo careers, they felt free to do whatever they wanted.
Country music may have helped bring them back together in the 1990s when Travis Tritt did a version of their song, but it’s not like they were using it as a crutch, either. ‘How Long’ may have put them back in the public eye in the 2000s, but they were far more interested in seeing where their muse would take them rather than getting stuck in any one style of music.
