“Really good material”: The album Don Henley said matched Eagles’ best work
Every single band is bound to find themselves in the same position that Don Henley was after making Hotel California.
Eagles had spent years trying to become one of the biggest forces in rock and roll music, and even if they weren’t the heaviest band in the world, there was no way to deny the songs when they told the story about the dark side of what Hollywood had to offer. But even if the allure of that album is still resonating to this day, Henley felt that there were some songs in their catalogue that actually managed to go toe-to-toe with some songs from their masterpiece.
But, really, every one of their albums before Hotel California had been inching towards it in some respects. Pieces of Desperado already set up their flair for thematic elements running through their records, and even when they made One of These Nights, they had started bending the kind of genres that they wanted to play with, especially with the title track flirting with just a little bit of disco in the way that Henley played the drums.
When someone makes a record as seminal as California, though, the last thing that you can expect is to have lightning strike twice right after. The Long Run was definitely a decent record compared to what everyone else was doing, but for following up on an album that landed in most American households, it wasn’t going to be lighting the world on fire in the same way. So when Henley and Glenn Frey decided to split up the band, Henley was content with leaving the legacy where it was.
Their reunions may have been a lot of fun for fans who didn’t get to live through the first wave of their career, but even if they had a handful of new songs, they felt more like solo songs that somehow got shoehorned onto Hell Freezes Over. But if ‘Get Over It’ showed promising signs of them making something new, Long Road Out of Eden was their one chance to wrap their career up on a high note. So did they actually end up making a late-career renaissance? Well, yes and no.
Admittedly, the album is way too long, and even Henley himself had talked about wanting to shorten it to a single album, but there are hardly any pieces of the record that are outright terrible. Some of their earlier records had tunes that seemed questionable right out of the gate, like ‘The Disco Strangler’, but all those decades away made them refine their talent and give it everything they had.
And for Henley, there are more than a few songs on the record that seemed to be a natural extension of where they left off on California, remarking after the fact, “There was no reason to do anything that might seem forced or contrived. So rather than try to go back in time or try to be flagrantly ‘progressive,’ we just wanted to be ourselves. I think there is some really good material on that album, some songwriting and playing that rivalled anything we’d done previously.”
You don’t necessarily hear anything too different on this record, but you do hear their lyrics gaining a lot more depth. Henley’s more cynical point of view on tunes like ‘Frail Grasp on the Big Picture’ and the title track are brilliant pieces of social commentary, and while Frey was the far more easygoing member of the partnership, having a song like ‘It’s Your World Now’ be his final Eagles work as a brilliant sendoff for his legacy.
There are more than a few rough edges, and there are definitely tracks that could have been cut to make it a brilliant single album, but it’s much better that the band overdelivered on their final outing. After all, this might as well have been one final party for them to throw, so they might as well go out with as many songs as they could.
