The 2007 album Eagles want you to forget about: “We don’t do them anymore”
There is no shortage of people that would probably kill to hear Eagles play their music for the rest of their lives.
Even though Don Henley has talked about closing up shop for good whenever the band performs their final shows, there’s no way of being able to feel the same rush hearing those harmonies on record compared to their live show. But even if every one of their records had more than a few stone-cold classics on them, there were more than a few times where the band tried to bury their own mistakes to a certain degree.
Because it’s no secret that Henley already had some choice words about some of their overlooked tunes. The singles became the singles for a reason, but when looking through some of the album cuts in their catalogue, he can get pretty derogatory when talking about the tunes that didn’t cut it. ‘I Wish You Peace’ was a song none of the band wanted to record before Bernie Leadon forced them to, and the further you go back in the timeline, the worse it seems to get for Henley to revisit.
Not all of his perspectives are great, like saying that he needed to redo his vocals on ‘Desperado’, but in many ways, one of their least essential records actually comes all the way up to Long Road Out of Eden. It was the biggest comeback that classic rock fans could have asked for at the time, but for any Eagles diehards in the audience, when’s the last time you’ve got to this record to listen to their classic tunes?
Is it absolutely terrible? No. As a matter of fact, the album is pretty, if not a little bit long, but everyone gets a chance to shine pretty well. The title track actually manages to pull off a 10-minute opus pretty well, and while there are some fan favourites like ‘How Long’ in the mix, the greatest strength of the record is in the ballads like ‘Waiting in the Weeds’ and ‘I Don’t Want to Hear Anymore’.
But according to bassist Timothy B Schmit, the band quickly realised that there was no reason for them to carry on playing those tunes when everyone insisted on hearing their classics, saying, “We put in five to seven of those songs [into the live set]. But we don’t do them anymore because there wasn’t a big reaction. When people come to see the Eagles, they want to hear ‘Best of My Love’, ‘One of These Nights’, all these things. So we give it to them.”
That hasn’t stopped Henley from throwing in ‘Boys of Summer’ into the set or Joe Walsh getting his own featured spot on ‘Life’s Been Good’, but chances are Henley sees more of the flaws in their massive comeback record. It could have definitely been condensed down, but having too much of a good thing isn’t really a fault. And given where they were, Henley was happy to close things out on his own terms.
Because in his mind, this is the final record that Eagles will ever release. He’s glad to keep the material rolling on and making the odd solo album here and there, but since Glenn Frey is no longer with us, having him be the final voice on the record signing everything off on ‘It’s Your World Now’ is probably the best kind of epitaph that they could have hoped for after going out with a whimper on The Long Run.
It was nice to give people a look at what the band was doing in the 2000s, but the premise behind their tours have shifted more than a few times. There was no point in trying to release an album anymore if people wanted to hear the hits, and even if they had a lot more to say, they were content knowing that they had already made their best points back in the 1970s.
