The Eagles songs Glenn Frey called his “personal favourites” and a “quantum leap” for the band
Since the 1970s, the Eagles have been the soundtrack for what many think of as classic rock. Never ones to stuff their albums with filler, nearly every song that came from the band in their prime had to mean something, whether it was about the dangers of the music industry or talking about how the planet is being treated.
Although Glenn Frey was more than happy to write any song that Don Henley would throw at him, he admitted two tracks summed up what the band were all about.
When first getting the band together, Frey was initially just a session musician, working alongside Don Henley as a member of Linda Ronstadt’s backing band. Once Ronstadt’s manager decided to bring a supergroup in to back up the California hitmaker, Frey and Henley figured they would be better off creating their outfit, quickly putting a group together with Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner.
Although the first album was a massive success with songs like ‘Take it Easy’, the band hit a bit of trouble when approaching their album Desperado. Going into country territory, the album bombed at the time, with the title track only gaining notoriety once Ronstadt recorded her version of the song a few months later.
Once the band started to refine their sound in the studio with producer Bill Szymczyk for albums like On the Border, they became a rock and roll tour de force. When putting the pieces together for the follow-up album, though, the addition of guitarist Don Felder yielded one of the biggest hits of their career with ‘One of These Nights’.
Being one part Motown and one part classic rock, the song would become a favourite of Frey’s throughout the band’s career, telling Life in the Fast Lane, “We made a quantum leap with ‘One of These Nights’. It was a breakthrough song. It is my favourite Eagles record. If I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be ‘Hotel California’; It would be ‘One of These Nights.”
During a conversation with Bob Costas, Frey would go one better and pick out his “personal favourite Eagles song, noting: “‘One of these Nights’ — my personal favourite Eagles song, along with ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’. I think I would put those two as my personal favourites.”
While the band came out strong on their fourth outing, it would be the following album that sent them over the top. With the release of Hotel California, the band created some of the biggest hits of their career, from the hedonist lifestyle in ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ to the tales of love lost on ‘Wasted Time’.
After creatively running dry for the follow-up album The Long Run, newcomer Timothy B Schmidt stepped up to the challenge with a song of his own. Replacing Meisner, Schmidt had the beginnings of a piece called ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’, which would become one of the band’s final hits before their breakup in the early 1980s.
Schmidt remembered: “It was co-written by me and Don (Henley) and Glenn (Frey). I did bring a portion of that song, unfinished, to them back then, because I was new in the band and they wanted to introduce me on a good note, no pun intended. And I had this little piece of a tune that they really liked. It was loosely based on my own experiences.”
Frey also considered this song one of his favourites while in the band. Considering his taste in music, both ‘One of These Nights’ and ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ have more than a few things in common. Outside of their inherent catchiness, there’s a soulful element to both tracks, almost reminiscent of the sounds of Motown coming out a decade prior.
Given Frey’s roots in Detroit before moving to California, there’s a good chance that the songs remind him of the music he grew up on. If music is anything, it is the soundtrack to our lives and, as any psychologist will tell you, the memories we make when we are young are the most pertinent of all.
