The Eagles’ most commercially successful song, according to Don Henley
The Eagles are a culture oddity that the ensuing decades have failed to bring any clarity to. They are among the best-selling rock bands of all time, knocking on The Beatles’ door for poll position. However, even during their pomp, the group were able to wander around Los Angeles largely unrecognised.
At the height of the 1970s, as it was becoming clear that music was edging closer to commercialism, somehow, the Eagles made anonymity part of their act. Their soft rock dominated the radio waves, while the band themselves offered up a point of difference by avoiding the limelight and simply cracking on with creating a new brand of country-inclined rock ‘n’ roll.
This proved to be a masterstroke. By staying out of the picture, they managed to avoid typical music tribalism and appealed to a broad audience who were forced to judge them on their music alone. Often, it was too seamlessly catchy for people to resist. Don Henley noticed this when purveying those present at their live shows.
“I’ve noticed that my audience is pretty mixed,” he told the Sun-Sentinel. “There were people in their 30s and people in their 20s, and there were teenagers.” This typifies how the band become entwined with the proverbial statement: ‘I don’t like soft rock, but I love the Eagles’. According to Henley, one song was pivotal in achieving this broad appeal.
“And the teenagers, it’s funny — when I played ‘Witchy Woman,’ which is an Eagles song that’s 13 years old, the teenagers and the kids with the mohawks and the orange hair were going just as nuts as the people in their 30s,” he explained. “So, I think good material is timeless.”
In his view, the hook and mysticism of the song exemplified why they were so commercially triumphant without ever selling themselves out. Simply put, ‘Witchy Woman’ has a great hook, and it is imbued with enough trademark mysticism to make it unique to the band. Thus, he sees it as a timeless classic that will always sell.
“I’m not saying that ‘Witchy Woman’ is a good piece of material,” he said with typical humility, “but I think if you build things to last, then they last. Songwriting, songs, are the bottom line. And I think if you write good songs, then you’ll be around for a while.” That’s exactly what the Eagles did—they stood aside any trends, remained their own thing, and in an era that scrambled to find originality to escape the shadow of the 1960s, enough people were happy to buy into the simple ethos of the Eagles to launch them to success.
This was typified by ‘Witchy Woman’, a song that ironically inspired Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac so massively that they too would go on to become one of the biggest commercial bands of all time, albeit they took an entirely different approach to anonymity.
What was the Eagles’ best-selling song?
As it happens, in an economic sense, the sales figures for ‘Witchy Woman’ pale in comparison to some of their other hits. While the song might have had the wide fanbase that brought eyes into the band’s discography, it was actually more a brand track in that regard. The best-selling Eagles song is, in fact, ‘Hotel California’.
The signature single was certified gold for selling one million copies only three months after its release. It has never slowed down since. In the streaming era, it has been played over 1.5billion times on Spotify. It is also one of the key reasons that their Greatest Hits album became the biggest-selling album of all time in 2018. Although, as Henley will tell you, ‘Witchy Woman’ has a huge role in that too.
