The first Eagles song written after their breakup: “We can still do it”
It is easy to forget that behind the music are real people. The songs and albums which permeate our lives are just moments in theirs, and between them and the tours are moments of downtime, where their lives become real again, and not something you’d read about in a magazine. It means that if something happens between two albums, it will be reflected in the work. The title of Eagles’ comeback album, Hell Freezes Over, wasn’t thought of by accident.
After a massive falling out at the start of the 1980s, all of the tension gathered over years of being on the road finally came to a head, leaving every member going their separate ways for the rest of the decade. While they were on much better terms by the mid-90s, it was still up in the air whether that initial magic would spark again.
For the first few years of reunion talks, Glenn Frey remained one of the main holdouts, saying he wasn’t ready to get together with the rest of the guys for a crash-grab. Don Henley was also fine carrying on with his solo career, notching up hits like ‘Boys of Summer’ with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell. Though any talk seemed like speculation, a tribute album by country artist Travis Tritt made Frey start to reconsider.
Driven to make a collection of Eagles songs for Henley’s charity Walden Woods Project, Tritt had decided to cover the song ‘Take it Easy’ and asked if the rest of the band would appear in the video with him. According to Frey, it was so much fun reminiscing about the good times that all of the bad blood melted away, recalling in History of The Eagles, “I mostly remembered the good stuff. Just how we genuinely liked working together”.
By the time they wrapped up with the video, the wheels had started turning for an Eagles reunion, with the band having to get Joe Walsh sober before getting anything off the ground. Then again, no Eagles reunion would have been complete without a little bit of new material, and the first thing to do was to get Frey and Henley writing together.
After slaving away on their last album, The Long Run, Frey was hesitant about working together until Henley spoke up. As Frey explains, Henley had a title for a song called ‘Get Over It’. He said: “He proceeded to tell me everything that was pissing him off. About these celebrities that would go on TV and everything wrong with them is someone else’s fault. He said, ‘I’m just fed up with that, so I’m gonna write a song called ‘Get Over It’’.”
Taking a chord progression lifted from Chuck Berry, the song became one of the first major tunes to come from the Hell Freezes Over project, which also involved them reworking some of their original tunes through a modern lens like ‘Desperado’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’. All that was left was to make sure to get it right onstage.
Though the audience treated them warmly on their first shows for MTV, that’s not to say there weren’t a few hiccups. Midway through another new composition entitled ‘Learn to Be Still’, the first take saw Henley forgetting the words of the second verse, going blank before Frey falls into hysterics after he realises what happened.
Despite the hilarity, Frey returned from the first writing session rejuvenated, saying: “I was like, ‘Man, we can still do it. I can’t believe we just wrote a song together. Maybe we can write some more’”. Outside of the handful of songs off the live record, it would be a long road before a new album, with guitarist Don Felder being fired over financial disputes. “Glenn ran with it, and even though Don didn’t like it or think it was good enough. Glenn kept working on it and filling in the holes in the lyrics. Industry people said it was a hit.”
When the band finally reunited for Long Road Out of Eden, the double album experience showed fans every side of their artistic selves, from episodic tracks to ballads they could have written as younger men like ‘Busy Being Fabulous’. After years away from each other, that Eagles spark was still hanging around.
