‘Long Road Out of Eden’: Could Eagles’ double album have been cut down?
Any major comeback album is usually guilty of having a few too many cooks in the kitchen. There might be an ongoing need to ensure every band member is satisfied when coming back together, but sometimes, pleasing everyone doesn’t objectively make for the best record.
Sometimes it’s better to trim a lot of the fat so that everything sounds well-rounded, and it’s not like the remaining Eagles didn’t have their fair share of issues when regrouping.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey already had to deal with letting go of Don Felder before any proper studio reunion got off the ground, but ‘Hole in the World’ served as merely a teaser for what was to come. They had spent years trying to refine Long Road Out of Eden, but even if they did right by their fans by making sure the price of the record was reasonable, the idea of making it a double album wasn’t the best idea.
There are many moments on the record where things could have been cut, so instead of the album we know, what would this have been like as an overloaded single album? The final record already stands at a colossal 20 tracks, so this reimagined version would instead focus on a tight 12-track record, taking the best of everyone in the group.
First things first, it would be important to keep some of the central pieces. ‘No More Walks in the Wood’ works as a beautiful tone-setter for the top of the album, and ‘How Long’ does a great job at introducing everyone to that classic Eagles sound that had been missing for so long. But when the album gets going, there comes a point where it starts to lose its momentum a little bit.
Some of Henley and Frey’s tracks are great on their own, but they could have easily turned up on one of their solo projects rather than being thrown on here, and it doesn’t help that a handful of them are just too long. While a song like ‘Waiting in the Weeds’ certainly deserves to be on here, in a perfect world, it would be trimmed down to somewhere around five minutes rather than ballooning into seven.
For as long as Joe Walsh was in the band, keeping some of the humour on songs like ‘Last Good Time in Town’ was important to keep the good times flowing. This is a heavy album that touches on the dangers of going into the Iraq War at the time, so Walsh’s funny business does offer moments to breathe. And we can’t forget Timothy B Schmit as well. His voice was essential on their previous album, The Long Run, so giving him a solo spot on ‘I Don’t Want to Hear Any More’ is a great way to tie a bow on his contributions to the band.
Tunes like ‘Frail Grasp on the Big Picture’ or ‘Fast Company’ can easily be on Henley’s solo joints, but it’s not like Frey didn’t have a few stragglers as well. ‘Somebody’ fits within the band’s mould just fine, but songs like ‘No More Cloudy Days’ are a bit too pillowy to be included on an album meant to be some grand statement. But if there’s one thing the album can’t lose, it’s the title track.
It might stand at over ten minutes in length, and it could benefit from being placed in a different spot on the album. In our version, stacking it as the penultimate song on the record before Frey’s ‘It’s Your World Now’ helps both songs in equal measure, making the opus feel like a long journey and having Frey close the curtains on the band one last time.
Would this version of the album have helped save the band from a bit of bloat? It’s ultimately all up to the listener, but this speculative leaner iteration of the album could have given the band some incentive to get some more material worked up in the future. No matter which way you decide to listen to the record, though, it’s better to have the group go out on their own terms than have them stay too long at the party.
