‘Lyin’ Eyes’: The Eagles song that almost wrote itself
Creativity is a mystery. For those artistically inclined, they’ll understand the almost mythical feeling of an idea. They spark out of nowhere and hook on, consuming the creator as they demand to be realised. The best ones come with little to no effort required, as if a person falls into a trace and then reemerges with the finished product in hand. That’s the story of the Eagles track ‘Lyin’ Eyes’.
“Ideas are so beautiful, and they’re so abstract,” David Lynch once said about the process of creativity. He delved into a whole metaphor attempting to explain the feeling of getting and capturing that spark, likening it to fishing. “I think they exist, like fish,” he said, “And I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along.”
In the mid-1970s, Don Henley and Glenn Frey were waiting for ideas to come along as a house up on Briarcrest Lane in Los Angeles. As the new stars of the rock world, they’d already made their name. Now, they had to keep the ball rolling, which required new material. So, as Lynch said, a creative must, they waited.
However, a key part of Lynch’s analogy is that a person really has to wait by the water. Their hook always has to be thrown in, ready for something to bite. To some, that might mean simply keeping a notebook or a guitar nearby. To others, it might require a busy schedule of reading or listening to the work of others. For the Eagles back in the mid-70s, it was all location-based. They found that there was something about Briarcrest Lane that meant something always bit their bait, allowing them to write several of their best tracks there.
“The house was up on Briarcrest Lane,” Glenn Frey told The Uncool in 2003, “That’s where we wrote ‘One of These Nights,’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ‘Take It to the Limit,’ ‘After The Thrill Is Gone,’ and a couple of other tunes for the One of These Nights album.” It seemed to them like the place just buzzed with inspiration or that the quiet house gave them the clarity needed for those mythical ideas to fall into their brains.
One night, there was a pull on their line as a spark lit up in Frey and his bandmate’s minds. As with all the best pieces of art, the pair then seemed to disappear into a flow state which required no real work as the song appeared to them.
“I don’t want to say it wrote itself, but once we started working on it, there were no sticking points. Lyrics just kept coming out,” he said, explaining the creation of ‘Lyin’ Eyes’.
But part of the ongoing confusion and mystery surrounding creativity is the fact that it comes and then goes. For Frey and Henley, this moment stood out to them because it felt somewhat rare. While Lynch discusses how, eventually, an idea will always come, sometimes it takes a bit of a battle. Frey felt that, too, as he added, “That’s not always the way songs get written. I think songwriting is a lot like pushing a boulder up a hill.”
For ‘Lyin’ Eyes’, though, there was no strife involved as the song seemed to just appear to them like the future charting hit it was.
