‘How Long’: The Eagles song that waited 30 years to become a hit
The Eagles always had a particular set of standards for making songs for a record. Even if a track was written by one of the core members of the band, that didn’t mean that it was worthy enough to be a piece of filler in between masterpieces like ‘Hotel California’. While they may have had to make cuts during their prime, one of their first songs was forced to sit on the shelf for decades before coming out.
Before the band started out, Glenn Frey cut his teeth in the Los Angeles rock scene. After moving to the ‘City of Angels’ from Detroit, Frey became friendly with singer-songwriter J. D. Souther, meeting through their girlfriends. While Frey was initially working in a duo band with Souther called Longbranch/Pennywhistle, it wasn’t long before he started getting gigs working for people like Linda Ronstadt.
Once he started working as a side musician, though, Frey got the wheels turning for his outfit when he started performing with drummer Don Henley. As the 1970s got underway, the Eagles were born, with Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon rounding out the lineup for their first album. While Souther would move on to a solo career, he would remain a significant part of the core songwriting team.
Frequently collaborating with Souther, the Eagles would make some of their best tunes with the young songwriter, turning ‘Victim of Love’ into one of the standout deep cuts from their album Hotel California. While the band could turn anything Souther threw at them into magic, there was an unspoken rule about not covering anything Souther reserved for his solo albums.
One such song was ‘How Long’, telling the story of a man who finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks and has to watch his old flame back home rock herself to sleep. Though they would play the track intermittently throughout their early years, it would always be a product of the live stage for them…until the 2000s.
Coming back for their first album in decades, Long Road Out of Eden became one of the final statements that the Eagles ever made, complete with massive sweeping epics throughout the track listing. Before the heavy subject matter got underway, though, Frey was convinced by his wife to take a stab at ‘How Long’.
As Frey recalls, he was reminded of the track when his kids found footage of the band performing it online, telling History of the Eagles, “My kids came in and said, ‘Dad come here, you have to take a look at your hair’. [My wife] said, ‘Hey, that sounds like a hit Eagles song’”. Even though they had grown up since the days of ‘How Long’, they approached the tune like seasoned veterans in the studio.
Featuring a round-robin vocal tradeoff between Frey and Henley, the song became one of the biggest highlights of their new album, being one of the only tracks from the album that stayed in the group’s setlist on their legacy tours. While the Eagles may have tried to preserve their friendship with Souther by not cutting it back in the day, there’s something about those trademark harmonies that blend perfectly with the melody.
