Tale of the Tape: The difficult nature of the Eagles’ ‘The Long Run’
It can’t be easy to follow up on what most consider to be your finest album, but for the Eagles, it proved to be so tricky to the point that it split the band apart, and caused them to never release another record for 28 years.
The universal acclaim of Hotel California saw the band build upon all of their previous work as a group, solidifying everything they’d done on earlier albums and transforming it into perhaps the most succinct distillation of everything they were about. You might want to make the argument that Desperado, On the Border or even One of These Nights are better albums, but they didn’t receive the same critical and commercial acclaim as their fifth record together, and it was going to be hard to surpass that.
They had to pull out all the stops on their next release in order to remain at the top of their game, but unfortunately for them, that came at a damning cost. The Long Run should have been an opportunity for the Eagles to embark on a victory lap after their prior successes, but it ended up being a complete slog that they couldn’t bear repeating.
Trying to make The Long Run took 18 months of recording in five different locations, which led to extreme burnout and exhaustion from their attempts to craft the perfect album. As a result, this lengthy period of work meant that they were not only unable to come up with new and exciting ideas as fluently as they had on Hotel California, but that they were completely sick of each other’s company afterwards.
On top of this, a lot had changed in the musical landscape in the three years between the two releases, and with the emergence of new popular genres such as disco, punk and new wave, the tired sounds of their country-inflected soft rock weren’t as well received as they’d hoped.
If anything, Hotel California was always destined to be the band’s last hurrah because of the shifting times, and unless the Eagles were prepared to shake things up significantly and deliver a record that eschewed all of their previously established traits, they were going to be dismissed as ‘old hat’ in the press. Randy Meisner, who had been a key figure in the band since the beginning, chose to leave partway through recording, and was replaced by Timothy B Schmit, leaving the band to reckon with not only introducing a new element into the group, but also mourning the departure of another.
Given this lengthy slog that the band went through to deliver the album, there were also several scrapped ideas for the record that never came to fruition. They’d initially planned for The Long Run to be a double album, aiming to surpass the quality of Hotel California with a record of great magnitude, but the measly 10 songs that they delivered was nothing compared to the grand scale they’d envisaged. Several of the discarded songs would later make it onto compilation albums, but that doesn’t save this particular album from its inevitable disaster.
There’s nothing wrong with The Long Run, but there wasn’t anything they could possibly have done to prevent it from being a failure. The Long Run, and the Eagles, were doomed from the very start of the project, and until they managed to come together to create a more fitting swan song, and an actual double album in Long Road Out of Eden, it served as the underwhelming finale for a band that could have offered so much more by ending on a high.
