The Eagles song Don Henley called a miracle: “It was like a resurrection”
Any artist is only as good as the last thing they put out. Even though they might be the biggest name in music for an entire year, it only takes one bad song for people to start ignoring you entirely or question whether they even liked you in the first place. The Eagles needed to spend their first few years struggling after making the album Desperado, but Don Henley thought that ‘Best of My Love’ was a lifesaver for the group.
First of all, it’s not like On the Border was meant to set the world on fire upon release. From the minute that the band began working on the album, there was already tension in the studio between them and producer Glyn Johns. Sure, they could still deliver, but there just wasn’t a spark in the air when they started recording, which didn’t help when Johns started getting picky about them asking for less echo on the vocals.
After they washed their hands of Johns halfway through the project, the band suddenly came alive once they started work on the rest of the material. For Frey, everything clicked when Don Felder came on board, recalling in History of the Eagles, “We were backstage, and this guy was all over the neck”.
While Frey offered Felder the gig to join the band on the spot after working on the track ‘Already Gone’, it would be one of the leftovers from the Johns sessions that gave them a second wind. Although it still sounded closer to the old version of the Eagles, everything about ‘Best of My Love’ is pretty much perfect, from the sighing acoustic guitars plodding to Henley’s smooth voice guiding everything along.
Once the album was released, the rest of the singles sunk without a trace, except for the ballad. Henley later told Rolling Stone, “We had more or less given up hope for the success of the On the Border album, and we’d begun work on the next album. So when ‘Best of My Love’ took off, it was like a resurrection, a miracle. Totally unexpected.”
If you look at where the Eagles would be headed just a few albums later, you can see why the song doesn’t exactly fit. The band would still be delivering ballads until they dropped, but the production value and their rock and roll chops would become a lot more defined, especially towards the start of Hotel California when Joe Walsh joined the group.
Still, it’s hard not to see ‘Best Of My Love’ as one of the send-offs for the Desperado period of the band. The group had been working on a lot of the demos from Desperado on their third album, which also marked the final time they started to sound closer to country. There may have been the odd banjo part here and an acoustic guitar lead there, but after this album, you weren’t going to hear something like ‘Midnight Flyer’ ever again.
Granted, that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate a song like ‘Best of My Love’ while it lasts. The Eagles were progressing by leaps and bounds, though, and in just a few more years, they would be outgrowing their syrupy ballads for more complex material.
