The Beatles-inspired Eagles song about 9/11
While they’re best remembered for their productive spell throughout the 1970s when they released six albums over the course of the decade, few people talk about how laboured the process for making Eagles’ seventh album, 2007’s Long Road Out of Eden, was for the band. With work having begun in 2001 for their long-awaited reunion album, it took six years for the group to record the 20 songs that feature on it – almost the amount of time they’d made the previous six records in.
It wasn’t that it was an underwhelming farewell from the group, but the lengthy production of the album, coupled with the stretched-out runtime and lack of new ideas, meant that it has never quite lived up to the celebrated status that the albums from their heyday accrued. However, the band had been on a European tour and felt excited about the prospect of making music together again, and it wasn’t until the day they were meant to go into the studio that disaster truly struck.
Having loaded up the studio with all of their equipment on September 10th, 2001, the group were all but ready to begin recording what would be their first album in over two decades the following day, but after waking up to the news of the September 11th terror attacks that shook the world, they decided that they would delay the beginning of the sessions. “After hearing the news,” Glenn Frey recalled, “we called each other up and said, ‘What’s the point? I don’t think there’s anything worth showing up for today.’”
However, if there was one positive to emerge from the cancellation of their first album recording session, it was that the horrific news provided some inspiration to drummer and co-vocalist Don Henley, with him allegedly spending time contemplating the tragedy and penning an early draft to the song, ‘Hole in the World’.
“That evening,” Henley remembered, “Our recording session having been cancelled, I sat down at the piano in my home studio and started putting some chords with the phrase ‘hole in the world.’ Just sort of wrote the refrain in one sitting. After that, the first verse came fairly quickly and then I was stuck.”
While some of the songs came in a rapid wave of inspiration, Henley says that months passed before he showed the song to any of his bandmates. It wasn’t until further global events began to take place that he found further inspiration to draw from, with events such as the outbreak of the Iraq War allegedly providing him with more meanings to attach to the phrase ‘hole in the world’. It was at this point that they began to work on it as a combined effort.
“I took my unfinished piece to the studio and showed it to Glenn,” Henley continued, “And he eventually wrote the second verse. We started a third verse and then scrapped it in favour of simplicity. I originally envisioned it as a very short song, anyway, like those little snippets the Beatles used to do that only lasted for about a minute, but it turned out to be a little longer than that.” It’s interesting to hear that the song could initially have taken on the form of one of the vignettes that the Beatles included on Abbey Road, although the song would eventually never make it onto Long Road Out of Eden, so having it be a short interlude would have felt unusual.
Instead, the song was released as a standalone effort in 2003 while the war and after-effects of 9/11 were still ongoing for the US, and it felt all the more impactful for having been released in this manner. Speaking about the poignancy of the track, Henley said that while “the stars and stripes may be flying and the drums beating, but things are never going to be the same for some people. This is the 21st century. It’s complex, and people have forgotten about our history — if they ever really knew it in the first place.”
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