The story behind the Eagles last top 40 hit: “Almost a mystical thing about it”
What was once a vocal warm-up to some, and a heartfelt memory to others, became a chart-topping hit for the Eagles in 1980.
The evocative country tune ‘Seven Bridges Road’ ended up being recorded live two days before the band imploded, but the song’s journey to their stage had started ten years before.
A young country rock songwriter and guitarist was about to pioneer his genre when travelling along a country road outside Montgomery, Alabama. He and his two friends stopped to take in the sights of a deserted plateau illumined by the full moon. “Steve got out on the right-side fender,” one of the friends, Jimmy Evans, told writer Wayne Greenhaw, “We sat there a while, and he started writing down words”.
That’s how ‘Seven Bridges Road’ was born, an Americana country acoustic written by Steve Young. “As you went out into the countryside, the road became this dirt road, and you crossed seven bridges, and then it was almost like an old Disney scene or something, with these high-bank dirt roads and trees hanging down, old cemeteries and so on,” Young told Jeff Moehlis in 2010. This soft-sung recollection of beauty eventually inspired Young to quit his delivery job and solely focus on his music, but his 1969 debut album, Rock Salt and Nails, which featured the song, failed to attract much recognition.
However overlooked, Young’s work pioneered the alternative country movement, and those in the field were paying attention. Names like Keith Urban and Dolly Parton covered the song, but the first to creatively construct harmonies in its vocal arrangements was British folk rocker Iain Matthews. “Son of a gun if Don or somebody in the Eagles didn’t lift [our] arrangement absolutely note-for-note for vocal harmony…,” lamented Matthews’ producer Mike Nesmith.
And that’s exactly what happened: the Eagles had found the song and nurtured Matthews’ idea of a harmony to match, using it as a vocal warm-up behind the scenes of their On the Border tour in 1974. It was never meant to be a single, but the band eventually started to perform their warm-up on stage, and the rest is history.
“When we went out onto the stage, the lights would come up, and we’d be standing there at a single microphone to open the show with that same melodic, lilting song,” former Eagles guitarist Don Felder wrote in his book, “It blew people away. It was always a vocally unifying moment, all five voices coming together in harmony. I’d get goose bumps every night.”
To see the five almost get into character on stage, as if they were setting up a spell to cast on their audience, was a sight no one forgot. That lead to ‘Seven Bridges Road’ being released as a single in December 1980, almost a decade after its first released by Young, reaching number 21 on the Hot 100 chart.
“Consciously, when I wrote it, it was just a song about a girl and a road in south Alabama,” Young told the Gadsden Times in 1981, “Now, I think there’s almost a mystical thing about it”. Marked by its peaceful imagery and moving emotion building quietly powerful narratives, the song’s calming sentiment helped appease the grief of Eagles’ fans following their split. And yet, Young still pondered, “I still don’t understand why it was so successful, actually”.
