The 2007 album Glenn Frey called the Eagles’ greatest mission: “Our Holy Grail”
By the time Glenn Frey got the idea to put the Eagles back together, he didn’t have to prove himself to anyone anymore.
Some of the band’s greatest songs had become American standards by the time that classic rock radio started up, and even during his solo career, he was more than happy to take a few chances on his records and maybe star in the odd movie here and there. But after hell officially froze over, Frey knew that he had some work to do if he wanted to keep the spirit of the band alive for a little while longer.
But the fact that all of them could get into a room and play together again almost felt impossible. The ending of their career together couldn’t have been more ugly during that fight in Long Beach, but when Travis Tritt put together the idea for the band to appear in his video for the song ‘Take It Easy’, something felt different. Frey could feel what made them work so well back in the day, so why not try and give it a whirl one last time?
The biggest elephant in the room was going to be whether he and Don Henley could still write together again, but ‘Get Over It’ was the best step in the right direction that they could have asked for. A lot of the magic that they had from back in the day was still accounted for, but Frey didn’t want the chance to be simply another rock and roll nostalgia act. It wouldn’t have been a proper reunion without some new material, but they were going to take their sweet time before they were ready to unveil something new to the world.
Don Felder was already becoming a thorn in their side yet again, but ‘Hole in the World’ was a decent enough teaser for what they would eventually release. They weren’t afraid of getting a little bit political on their new material, and when looking at Long Road Out of Eden, it’s not like it didn’t sound like it was worth the wait. It sounded like it took an eternity to make, by which I mean it sounds more than a little bit bloated.
Don’t get me wrong: there are some great songs on this record and tunes that deserve to be up there with the classic Eagles tracks, but it does have more than a bit of fat on the album as well. Henley’s idea of the whole thing being pared down to one album did make a lot of sense, but it’s hard to think about which pieces to cut, especially with classic tracks like ‘Waiting in the Weeds’ and the title track going on well past the length of a single.
Considering how much time they put into the album, though, Frey was just happy to have had a record that showed the best that they could do at the end of their career, saying, “[The album was] our Holy Grail, our quest. A lot of things have to come together for the Eagles to do anything. We’re living in different places, we all have families, it’s a lot different to what it was in the late ’70s. But now the time is right. We can’t do it long-distance with Don living in Dallas and coming to LA for two weeks at a time. We all have to be in the same zip code for a period of time for the songs to get written and for it all to happen naturally.”
And seeing as this is the last album of original material that Frey released during his lifetime, it makes sense that these songs work as his final bow before his untimely passing. He was more than willing to let Henley do the heavy lifting on a few songs, but his message to his kids on tunes like ‘You Are Not Alone’ and ‘It’s Your World Now’ is a serviceable one for him to go out on.
Most bands normally don’t get the chance to see things out on their own terms like this, but half the reason why Long Road Out of Eden sounds the way it does is to try to tie up some loose ends. They didn’t say goodbye properly in the early 1980s, and since they had been touring for years at a time, it was about time that they reminded the world of why those harmonies resonated so well back in the 1970s.
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