The 2007 album Don Henley wanted to cut half of: “It should have been a single”
Nothing that the Eagles did was exactly perfect for Don Henley.
The country rock icons were known for settling for only the finest harmonies that anyone has ever laid down in the studio, but when you look at how all of them got along, it’s not like all of them wanted to be having fights every single time they walked out of the studio. Henley may have been the one who had the final say alongside Glenn Frey, but even he had those moments when he got outvoted in the studio whenever deleting some of their tracks.
Because as much as any Eagles album would have sold well back in the day, Henley preferred quality over quantity every single time. That’s the whole reason why he hasn’t released a dozen solo albums in the time since their breakup, and even when the band got back together for the first time during Hell Freezes Over, there’s a reason why they only had a handful of songs to put on their new record. He needed to see if he and Frey could write together again, and if they were going to put something under the Eagles’ banner, it needed to be something they both could be proud of.
But listening to those first initial steps, there were some moments where they played it a little bit safe. ‘Get Over It’ and ‘Learn to be Still’ are still fantastic songs, but when listening to them in isolation, it’s not hard to see them as Henley solo tracks that just happen to feature the members of his old band. If they were going to come back strong, though, they needed to make sure they had all the bugs worked out.
They already knew that Don Felder wasn’t going to be working with the band by the time they reached the 2000s, but Long Road Out of Eden wasn’t the kind of record that they whistled through in a year. They were slowly crafting every song in between tours, and when looking at the times they were living in, Henley was going to put everything he had into making commentary tracks.
Then again, making a massive “message” song was always going to look weird on the same album that had Joe Walsh tunes on it. Walsh was known to take the piss every now and again, and while ‘Last Good Time in Town’ is a decent song, the whole record feels a little bit disjointed, especially spread across two discs and featuring one massive ten-minute title track right in the middle of everything.
It’s still a fine record for what it was, but Henley felt that the record would have benefited from being cut in half in post-production, saying, “We had the luxury of time; we did a lot of touring during the making of that album. To this day, I still think it should have been a single album, but in order to give every member the space he needed and still maintain sound quality (fidelity), it became necessary to make it a double-disc package.”
For Eagles fans, though, more of those harmonies was never a bad thing, and the band at least did right by their audience by not raising the price of their album. They knew that retailers would have tried to hike up the price since it was a double record, but after making a deal with Wal-Mart, the band were at least trying to make an exclusive agreement where fans could pay for the record for the price of a single album.
Not everything works on Long Road Out of Eden, and you’d have to try really hard to convince someone that it’s the best record that the band ever made, but what it does right is stand as the final epitaph for the band. They were going to go out on their terms, and now that Frey is no longer with us, hearing them close the book on their own story was everything that a band could have hoped for when making their final record.
