How the Eagles closed the book on their career
Most artists don’t get a chance to end things on their own terms. It’s impossible to figure out the day that it’s time to hang it up, and many groups spend their entire career trying to recapture their glory and continue to see diminishing returns until they eventually fade away. The Eagles knew what they were about, though, and when they returned with Long Road Out of Eden, it was all about getting reacquainted with what made them special for one final ride.
Given that they had gone through some of the biggest hurdles that any group had to go through, it’s a miracle that they could still stand upright for a show. There had been bad blood even at the reunion, with guitarist Don Felder being fired from the group again, so if they were going to release anything, his tasty fills were going to be sorely missed.
Although ‘Hole in the World’ was a decent way to get them back on the radio in response to 9/11, the heavy subject matter and Don Henley’s felt more like a one-off than a proper project. If they were going to get back together, it would have to be done right, and it wasn’t exactly the most breezy experience going through the album.
Because if you’re going into this album blind, it’s a bit of a rough ride hearing what they’ve been up to. Since every member had their own solo gigs to go through, a lot of the songs on here tend to feel like a grab bag of rock and roll crossed with modern country music that any respectable dad would be proud to rock in his car.
For someone who’s actually ingrained with the Eagles’ repertoire, this is the victory lap that most were only hoping would come. While your humble author had been familiar with tunes like ‘Desperado’ and ‘Hotel California’ before, hearing everything leading up to this record was almost mandatory listening.
With the context of the rest of their work in the background, Long Road Out of Eden is a love letter to their past work and also an opportunity to tie up any loose ends. There is one iconic track on here in ‘How Long’ leftover from the 1970s, but even the newer tracks have a certain sheen to them, as if they’ve all been sitting on this material for a while and just got around to releasing it in the 2000s.
From a lyrical standpoint, though, Henley and Glenn Frey are looking to make people think as much as they were back in their prime. ‘No More Walks in the Wood’ picks up where ‘The Last Resort’ left off in terms of how we’re treating the planet by interpolating a poem of the same name. And while the title track does date the album a wee bit by singing about the Iraq War, there’s still the beating heart of country rock in there somewhere, as if they’re talking universally about how we relate to each other.
Whereas Henley can be the Bono of the group (occasionally pretentious), Frey always balances him out with songs like ‘What Do I Do With My Heart’, taking that earnest songwriting from before and making it shine that much more. It’s not all serious, either, with Joe Walsh turning in some of his sillier songs on ‘Last Good Time in Town’. Walsh might be old enough to be a grandpa now, but the tone he strikes is the kind of wild old man who has a million stories still to tell.
But the biggest surprises are the new (and not so new) recruits in the band. Since Timothy Schmitt never had the opportunity to spread his wings for that long, hearing him sing songs like ‘I Don’t Want To Hear Any More’ is exactly what many people wanted to hear from him but never did. And while Steuart Smith is far from the fretboard master that Felder was, hearing him contribute to songs like ‘Waiting In the Weeds’ toes the line between a Don Henley solo project and a glimpse of that Eagles brilliance.
More than anything, Long Road Out of Eden is the kind of reflective album that makes the group think critically about their place in the world. They knew that they probably weren’t going to be around for much longer, so it’s much better to talk about the pieces of wisdom that you learned along the way.
And since Frey passed away in 2016, hearing him end the album with ‘It’s Your World Now’ is probably the most poignant note anyone could have asked for. The masters had set out their template for what they stood for, and now it was up to the rest of us to figure out what they were doing and try to build upon it.
