The Eagles song Glenn Frey thought they could never make: “I was less than confident”
When Eagles broke up, you couldn’t have found someone who was happier than Glenn Frey and Don Henley.
It was heartbreaking to lose a group that they had invested so much time into, but by the time their final show ended, there was no way any of them could have put up with working on another record, another show, or even another song together again. Frey was right on the money when he called their split a horrible relief, but he wasn’t about to stop having fun once the California sunshine faded.
He wanted to keep making music no matter what, and No Fun Aloud was a step in the right direction. The last few Eagles projects had been an attempt to outdo everything that they had ever done before, and even if there were some rough edges to a few of Frey’s solo hits, that didn’t matter. It was about playing with his musical friends again, and it wasn’t like any of his bandmates were itching to get back together yet, either.
The wounds were still too fresh between everyone, and Henley was more than a little bit pissed when he saw Frey’s first record do well. He wanted the chance to be a superstar too, and when he first started making tunes like ‘Dirty Laundry’, he left the rest of his bandmates in the dust. Both Frey and Joe Walsh had fantastic solo careers, but Henley was far better equipped to get back in the public eye, especially with songs like ‘The Boys of Summer’ under his belt.
Frey may not have been the number-one rock and roll star anymore, but that was fine. The calls kept coming in for Eagles to get back together, but Frey was still having a ton of fun working on tunes like ‘You Belong to the City’, and no matter how big a check anyone waved in his face, it wasn’t going to be enough to bring all of them in one room and writing songs again. And if we’re being completely transparent here, chances are that Frey was scared about whether they could manage to get everything back together.
If I can play armchair psychologist here for a second, the pressure of any Eagles reunion would have been nerve-wracking even for someone like Frey, so the pressure of new material on top of that would have meant them trying to reach the level of ‘Desperado’ or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ again. That kind of feat felt impossible, but Frey felt like there was a way through all that confusion once the band finally decided to work on ‘Get Over It’.
They had to certainly dust the cobwebs off a little bit, but after Henley brought in the title of the track, Frey was thrilled to see that they didn’t lose an ounce of their magic, saying, “During The Long Run our creative relationship became strained, perhaps just because we’d been going to the well for so long. We struggled to complete all the songs for The Long Run album. Let’s just say that I was less than confident that Don and I could get back in a room together and get through a piece of work. ‘Get Over It’ showed us that we could get together and write again.”
But for all of the great moments in the tune, ‘Get Over It’ doesn’t sound like an Eagles song that got resurrected years after the fact. Henley had been honing his craft as a lyricist for years at that point, and his biting lyrics about celebrity tabloids and people complaining on television about their problems feel like the older, wiser cousin of Henley’s solo hit ‘Building the Perfect Beast’.
Frey helped add the rock and roll flair to everything, and Walsh and Felder’s guitar solos were the icing on the cake, but it wasn’t a case of all of them guesting on one of Henley’s tunes. This was an Eagles song from skin to core, and if Frey and Henley could get this song off the ground, there was no limit to where they could go if they tried working together properly.
