Every Eagles Song Ranked: Songs 88-71

88. “Born to Boogie” (recorded 1979, released 2000). Likely an in-studio jam not originally meant for outside ears, this silly castoff from the Long Run sessions is a breezy, ZZ Top–styled groove as well as a good reminder that the Eagles could rip it up when they got loose, thanks to a thumping beat and cat-scratch guitars. That said, listening to this disposable Hank Williams Jr. cover once out of curiosity is plenty.
 
87. “Get You in the Mood” (single-only release, 1971). The B-side to the Eagles’ first single hints at one musical direction Frey could have taken, had life spun him toward a solo career instead of forming a band—and had he not hooked up with a collaborator as literate as Henley. Overt and slinky (translation: borderline predatory), “Get You in the Mood” has propulsive musicality, putting it on the bluesier side of the spectrum the band explored in its early cuts, but, man, do the lyrics illustrate why we’re lucky Henley came along.
 
86. “Guilty of the Crime” (Long Road Out of Eden). Henley has said he wishes the band’s first studio album in 28 years had been condensed to one solid disc instead of two uneven CDs. This throwaway cover of a tune by Frankie Miller and Jerry Lynn Williams illustrates why. A greasy bar-band burner with an abrasive vocal by Walsh, honking slide-guitar noises, and trite lyrics, the tune doesn’t come close to passing the smell test. Even worse, the material is recycled, because Walsh previously cut a version for a TV soundtrack album. A low point in every possible respect.
 
85. “The Girl from Yesterday” (Hell Freezes Over). Frey’s undemanding country ballad (written with Jack Tempchin) is pretty and tasteful, and Frey stretches his voice in a pleasantly affecting fashion while Henley shadows him, all to the accompaniment of an easy, loping beat and solid cry-in-yer-beer guitar twang. To call the song unremarkable, however, is to give it too much credit.
 
84. “Chug All Night” (Eagles). Kudos to the boys for including a few rippers on their debut album. Kudos, as well, to producer Glyn Johns for pointing out that rippers are not the Eagles’ forte. Later in their run, the band found ways to balance high-octane guitars with their core strengths of melody and storytelling. On this early effort, the strain shows. One would hardly place “I do believe we can hug all night” among the great erotic euphemisms in pop history. Still, a kindhearted fan can listen to this one and revel in the joy of the playing as well as the braggadocio that infuses Frey’s vocal. As the band proved once Felder and later Walsh joined the mix, it’s not that they couldn’t rock. It’s that, unlike the Stones or the Who, they couldn’t rock for the sake of rocking—the Eagles always did their best when they had a clear and worthy narrative destination. “I do believe we can hug all night” ain’t that.
 
83. “I Love to Watch a Woman Dance” (Long Road Out of Eden). Perhaps the most unnecessary song on Long Road, seeing as how cutting Walsh’s lackluster tracks would have eliminated his lead-vocal presence entirely, Frey’s cover of Larry John McNally’s gently romantic tune suits Frey’s After Hours–era lounge act better than it does the Eagles’ aesthetic. Like “The Girl from Yesterday,” the tune is played and sung well, and McNally’s poetry is fine, but, in a word, meh. Henley fared better with his own McNally cover a few years prior, including “For My Wedding” on his Inside Job disc.
 
82. “Last Good Time in Town” (Long Road Out of Eden). The frustrating thing about Walsh’s two cuts on Long Road is that he wasn’t short of inspiration. He’d already written the heartfelt “One Day at a Time” (briefly part of the Eagles’ live set), so it appears he was stockpiling solo material for the album that eventually became Analog Man. This lengthy tune, his only original on two platters of Long Road, contains several different song ideas, some of which are better than others, and lots of what Walsh calls “guitar statement.” Alas, the pieces neither beguile nor cohere. The verses are goofy, the choruses are majestic, and the trope of Schmit answering Walsh phrase for phrase merely kills time. (The song runs an interminable seven minutes.) Whereas Henley uses his Long Road tracks for reflection and Frey revels in legacy, Walsh, ever the cutup, says he’s cool with being a stay-at-home dad after years of under-the-influence excess. Not exactly the stuff of rock-music bliss.

81. “Get Up Kate” (recorded 1971, unreleased). A middling rocker with a Frey lead vocal, “Get Up Kate” was cut as a studio track for the debut LP but never officially released. (A live version, featuring harmonies by Linda Ronstadt, appears on one of her compilations, and the band’s studio version can be found online.) The story goes that after returning from their London sessions with Glyn Johns, the band went back to the studio with producers Bill Halverson and Wally Heider to record additional tracks. One of those, “Nightingale,” was subsequently rerecorded by Johns and added to the album. The other, “Get Up Kate” (written by Frey), was shelved. Like “Chug All Night,” the forgettable tune proves that bar-band grooves and the Eagles don’t always mix well. Nonetheless, high harmonies give the choruses snap and the dual-guitar stuff has spunk.

80. “Visions” (One of These Nights). Noteworthy as the only track on an Eagles album featuring a Felder lead vocal, this one’s a winner musically and a big fat zero lyrically. Fast and nasty, with a rangy melody and lots of kick, the song has enough showboating guitar for an entire album, and the way the band’s other singers provide counterpoint to Felder’s multitracked lead reinforces why they normally buried his voice in harmonies: bland tone, weak range. “Visions” is highly listenable, especially because it’s sequenced perfectly between the epic “Take It to the Limit” and the downbeat “After the Thrill Is Gone” on One of These Nights. Nonetheless, it says a lot that Felder rarely includes the number in his solo shows. Even he doesn’t groove on this one.
 
79. “Love Will Keep Us Alive” (Hell Freezes Over). Schmit always comes across as the sanest Eagle, a chill hippie unburdened by the anger-management issues, ego trips, or substance-abuse demons that fuel his more colorful bandmates’ creativity. He’s also a fine lead singer for gentle love songs, a top-shelf rhythm player, and a world-class harmony vocalist. Like Felder, however, he’s not a songwriter of great distinction, so it took assistance from Frey and Henley to transform his sketch for “I Can’t Tell You Why” into a classic. All of this goes to explain why Schmit’s other big Eagles hit was created outside the group. Prior to the band’s 1994 reunion, Felder and Schmit formed a group with Traffic’s Jim Capaldi, Squeeze’s Paul Carrack, and journeyman singer Max Carl. Capaldi and Carrack, together with Peter Vale, wrote this vapid ballad for the endeavor, but the group failed to score a label deal, so the track remained available. It then became Schmit’s only lead vocal on Hell Freezes Over besides a live version of “I Can’t Tell You Why,” and it hit No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. If it sounds as if these remarks are a means of talking about everything except the song itself, there’s a reason—despite the angelic harmonies and attractively circular guitar patterns, “Love Will Keep Us Alive” is four minutes of nothing.
 
78. “Teenage Jail” (The Long Run). If you want the perfect snapshot of the Eagles hitting the coked-out, frictioned-out, successed-out low point of their painful Long Run sessions, look no further than this depressing dirge. Powered by nihilistic lyrics, a death-march rhythm, howling vocal counterpoints, and get-me-the-fuck-to-detox instrumental freakouts, the song belongs on something like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, where suicidal wails are the norm. In the context of The Long Run, it’s the most redundant of several grim proclamations. “Teenage Jail” validates Felder’s complaints about the band defaulting to Henley singing lead on nearly every track—although tunes sung by Felder weren’t necessarily the solution, it’s a drag to listen to this disposable tune and wonder what viable ideas from Schmit and Walsh never made it off the launch pad.
 
77. “Wasted Time (Reprise)” (Hotel California). This callback to an earlier track isn’t properly an original song—rather, it’s a minute-and-a-half instrumental piece for strings, reiterating and complicating the melody of “Wasted Time.” It’s also beautiful and moving, providing a richly textured transition from the mournful “Wasted Time” to the merciless “Victim of Love.” Props for the cut go not only to Henley and Frey for the melody but also to Henley’s old Felicity/Shiloh bandmate Jim Ed Norman, who arranged the strings and presumably contributed the spellbinding counterpoint passage that makes the reprise worthy as a stand-alone experience.
 
76. “Train Leaves Here This Morning” (Eagles). The cheap joke is to call this one a Byrd dropping. Before landing his spot in the Flying Burrito Brothers alongside Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons, Leadon played with another member of the Byrds, Gene Clark, in the pioneering country-rock outfit Dillard & Clark. The relationship led Clark and Leadon to cowrite this exceedingly mellow number, and in fact an earlier version of the tune appears on the lone Dillard & Clark LP. As for the Eagles rendition, it’s got that appealing down-home bounce one associates with authentic old-school country music, and the ambivalent lyrics say something about reaching personal crossroads. However, the narrative is so vague, and the melody so leisurely, that the song makes only the faintest of impressions. On the plus side, “Train Leaves Here This Morning” works as part of the overall vibe of the first album, though it represents a type of I-guess-that’s-good-enough, pass-the-joint, hippy-dippy musicianship the band was wise to leave behind.
 
75. “Midnight Flyer” (On the Border). Meisner sings the dorkiest song on the band’s third album, a pickin’-and-grinnin’ bopper penned by Memphis-born singer-songwriter Paul Craft. Far more of a piece with the rural material on the band’s first record than with the increasingly sophisticated stuff that dominates On the Border, “Midnight Flyer” is performed and sung with the group’s usual professionalism. Leadon sounds like he’s having a blast scratching his Grand Ole Opry itch, and Meisner demonstrates once more why his voice was strong enough to rise above the noise of busy arrangements. By this point in the band’s development, however, they had so much more to offer than layering oohs and aahs atop frivolous ditties.
 
74. “No More Cloudy Days” (Long Road Out of Eden). See the comments about Air Supply regarding “What Do I Do With My Heart” (song No. 67 on this list) and multiply them by, say, a factor of five here. Were this a Frey solo track, it would rate as one of his prettiest love songs, benefiting from an inviting drum pattern, a soaring chorus, enveloping harmonies, and that gorgeous ache in Frey’s voice during the pre-chorus. Alas, the lyric is a Hallmark greeting card, all clichés and platitudes. Consider this yet another room in the house that “Best of My Love” built. Technically, “No More Cloudy Days” performed better than any other single from the Long Road Out of Eden era by hitting No. 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart in 2005, when it was among the teaser tracks released in tandem with the band’s Farewell 1 concert DVD. 
 
73. “Long Road Out of Eden” (Long Road Out of Eden). Whereas the Eagles’ longest ’70s song, “The Last Resort,” feels like it grew to epic proportions organically, the even-longer title track of the band’s final studio album seems like a hubristic attempt at a grand statement. Sprawling lugubriously over 10 minutes and change, the track has some terrific colors, from the Middle Eastern intro to the operatic build of the pre-choruses, and the song finds Henley in full literary-lion mode, striving to make sense of the American public’s seeming indifference toward their own government’s rampant imperialism. (He shares writing credit with Frey and Schmit.) Also thrown into the mix are the creation of the universe, the anguish of religious wars, a vague glimpse of a love story, and pecan pie. Strange as it is to say that a 10-minute track doesn’t have room for everything Henley tries to include, the lyric is simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, which has a deleterious effect on the music track. If “The Last Resort” finds Henley employing the classical-music technique of developing phrases by adding more intensity with each repetition, “Long Road Out of Eden” finds him humping the same grooves over and over again simply because he hasn’t yet shot his verbal wad. There might have been a tight six-minute song in this material, and there also might have been a more satisfying 15-minute suite in the material. As is, “Long Road Out of Eden” is intermittently beautiful and occasionally wise.
 
72. “Funky New Year” (single-only release, 1978). Another throwaway in the “Born to Boogie” vein, executed with the spit and polish fans had come to expect post–Hotel California. The story goes that Asylum was itching for new Eagles product while the band dithered on The Long Run, so the Eagles put aside the serious work of writing new material to cut a smooth cover of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.” This original track, featuring a tossed-off lyric over a swampy groove as well as some gritty Henley vocals, provided the B-side. Credited to Frey, Henley, Seger, and Souther, “Funky New Year” isn’t the worst as piffle goes, but it’s far from exemplary. The song was revived, naturally, for the band’s Millennium Concert in 1999.
 
71. “Somebody” (Long Road Out of Eden). Viewed skeptically, Long Road is a weird hybrid: part Frey solo album, part Henley solo album, a few bits and pieces from Schmit and Walsh, and maybe 40 minutes worth of genuine collaborative efforts by the Eagles. Consider this hard-charging song part of the Frey album, even though other band members are audible in the harmonies. A thriller movie disguised as a pop song, the eerie number written by Jack Tempchin and John Brannen features a protagonist succumbing to paranoia, or something like that, as machine-gun guitars ricochet off pummeling drums. Of all the Frey-centric tracks on Long Road, this one’s the most unapologetically retro, because it’s easy to envision “Somebody” underscoring a chase scene on Miami Vice.