Who was ‘The New Kid in Town’ in the Eagles’ classic?
While the title track may be the song everyone knows from the Eagles’ record-breaking fifth album, Hotel California, it wasn’t the song that the band led with when choosing their first single to promote the release.
That honour went to ‘New Kid in Town’, a pop-rock sensation featuring characteristically sublime three-part harmonies and a Mexican guitar solo from Randy Meisner. It was quite the mixture, but the band were always known as expert mixologists, and this new blend exemplified their advancement in style.
The public gulped it down. The song was the band’s third number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and the second to have been co-written with country-rock legend and longtime collaborator JD Souther. A new ensemble era was underway.
Souther came up with the chorus melody and the first lyrics to be written, but lead vocalist Glenn Frey was the one ultimately responsible for the lion’s share of the writing alongside Henley. Together, they easily polished the track into something with radio appeal, even if the subject matter was rather more personal.
It was Frey who gave the track its title, taking inspiration from a conversation with one of his “old friends”. In the lyrics, the “new kid in town” starts off as the man the singer is addressing, who “everybody loves” precisely because he’s fresh on the scene.
He falls for a woman who catches his eye, and the two dance like “hopeless romantics”. It’s only a matter of time, though, before he starts “looking the other way”. His love interest feels neglected, especially when he’s “not around”. It’s a familiar tale of a failing ‘spark’.
Pretty soon, the song’s protagonist has been replaced by another “new kid in town”, who he sees “holding” his ex-lover as it draws to a closer. It’s a clever conceit, written to a formula but compelling nonetheless. But Frey got the idea for this narrative progression from something he actually said to his friend.
So, who was he talking to?
Frey was welcoming NHL hockey player Gene Carr to town when he thought up what he was about to write. When it became known that Carr was his inspiration for the song, people began to speculate that the two of them were also involved in some form of romantic rivalry.
Carr rubbished these rumours in a 2019 interview with the New York Times. “It really says nothing about me, if you listen to every word,” he explained. The amorous elements of the song are likely fictitious.
Instead, the hockey player gave Frey the idea for the titular line, as well as the first verse’s portrait of someone with “great expectations” on their shoulders. He’d just been traded to the Los Angeles Kings, the Eagles’ local hockey team, from the New York Rangers on the other side of the US. Frey was discussing the pressure on Carr’s shoulders as the Kings’ latest signing and literally told him, “You’re the new kid in town.”
As a travelling sports star, this was something he knew a lot about. So the initial meaning behind the lyrics had nothing to do with love or being the centre of female attention at all. It was about the attention that came with being a well-known sports star moving to a new team in a new city with new ambitions to fulfil that are a few bad results away from faltering. This explains the lack of sustained feeling in the lyrical narrative.
Frey did what he needed to get from A to B with the song. And with the pristine vocals and lush instrumentation on the track, the lack of truth in the story didn’t matter a jot. The Eagles were always all about finding great American truths within great American fictions, and that pretty much became the theme for the whole record in the end.
