Who wrote the Eagles songs ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ and ‘Already Gone’?
One of the things the Eagles could pride themselves on from the release of their very first record was their original songwriting. Every Eagles album includes at least one songwriting contribution from each of the band’s members at the time it was recorded, which is a testament to the unique blend of different voices and creative talents within the group throughout their fabled career.
For one thing, there aren’t many bands out there that could boast of having a drummer who’s also one of their lead singers and leading songwriters. Through the years, it was Don Henley’s songwriting partnership with Glenn Frey that became the glue which held the Eagles’ music together, underpinning the musicianship and creativity within the group as a whole. But before they forged that cast-iron understanding of each other’s songcraft, Henley and Frey would go to others for songwriting help.
Frey co-wrote the band’s first single ‘Take It Easy’ with legendary Los Angeles folk rocker Jackson Browne, while Henley penned their second, ‘Witchy Woman’, with guitarist Bernie Leadon. But it was the third single off their self-titled debut album which was actually the first to have been written, by a friend of Frey’s before the Eagles had even been formed.
When they got together in 1971, one of the first things Frey, Henley, Leadon and Randy Meisner did was work through the harmonies for ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. Frey had recorded his friend’s demo of the track and brought it to his new bandmates. “Glenn came in and heard it and asked if he could put it on cassette tape,” the track’s composer recalls. The next thing he knew, his track was on an Eagles record.
So, who’s the songwriter?
“I’ve got a new band, Jack,” Frey told him. “We worked up your song.” The two of them happened to be sitting in the apartment above Jackson Browne’s house, but this was a different Jack altogether, talking to the new rhythm guitarist of the Eagles. It was the young San Diego native Jack Tempchin, who’d first met Frey when he performed with Longbranch Pennywhistle at the Back Door folk club where Tempchin worked.
Once the two got to know each other, Frey would invite Tempchin to stay with him, and they’d go round to Browne’s apartment and jam together. One day, their jam happened to be Tempchin’s country-rock lullaby, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’.
Tempchin had written the song in the middle of the night after a gig with some friends in the Southern California town of El Centro. He assumed he was going home with a waitress he’d been chatting to at the club they played, but she left without him, and the lights went out. “So I’m stuck on the linoleum floor, in this little place all night trying to sleep,” he recently told the Backstory podcast. “That’s when I started writing the song.” Days later, Tempchin returned to the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled down some lyrics that night. “I saw this phrase, peaceful, easy feeling. I went, Hey, that’s cool.”
The single reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which gave Tempchin the confidence to send more of his compositions his friend’s way. Next came ‘Already Gone’, a track the Eagles released as a single from their third album On the Border, which Tempchin wrote with his bandmate Rob Strandlund before a gig at the Back Door “in about 20 minutes”. He mailed a tape of the song to Frey, and he soon had two songs on the best-selling album of the 20th century in the United States, Eagles: Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975).
After the band reformed in 1994, Tempchin would go on to co-write three more Eagles tracks. ‘The Girl from Yesterday’ features on 1994’s Eagles Unplugged, while ‘Somebody’ and ‘It’s Your World Now’ ended up on their final studio album, Long Road Out of Eden, which was released in 2007.
It’s his writing credits on two of the band’s best-loved songs that he’ll be remembered for, though. Fittingly, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ and ‘Already Gone’ span the breadth of the Eagles’ music, from their softer country sound to the harder rock of their later albums and from sweet ecstasy to bitter heartbreak. Tempchin could cover all bases. The only surprise is that Frey didn’t turn to him for tunes more often.
