20. “Best of My Love” (On the Border). The song’s virtues are inarguable. Beautiful melody. Great playing. Remarkable lead vocal by Henley. Nonetheless, it says volumes that in addition to becoming the band’s first No. 1 pop hit—by way of a truncated version absent more than a minute of the original recording—“Best of My Love” topped the Easy Listening chart, where it was preceded by a song from the Osmonds and followed by one from Olivia Newton-John. Written by Frey, Henley, and Souther, “Best of My Love” made the Eagles synonymous with unthreatening love songs. On the plus side, maybe that pushed them to explore harder sounds. On the minus side, it gave the Eagles a safe place to hide once they reunited, as seen by the barrage of unthreatening ballads that began with 1994’s “Love Will Keep Us Alive” and continued through multiple saccharine numbers on Long Road. Presaging the fate that befell the Police’s biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take,” “Best of My Love” is also a ballad that casual listeners embrace for its comforting hooks and soothing melodies, oblivious to the meaning of the lyrics. After all, the titular phrase is an expression of defeat rather than one of devotion. Sometimes the Eagles really were too clever for their own good, because in this case they hid a bitter pill in too much sugar. Still, as far as this ranking goes, all of those extrinsic considerations are academic—what matters is the song’s impeccable craftsmanship.
19. “Heartache Tonight” (The Long Run). Frey’s old buddy Seger improvised the chorus when the band was stumped about where to take the song, so perhaps the spontaneity of “Heartache Tonight” is what makes it such a vibrant jukebox thumper. (Seger shares songwriting credit with usual suspects Frey and Souther, who started the song together, and Henley, who contributed.) The irony, of course, is that the song’s rhythm track sounds absurdly processed. As always, one of the Eagles’ special skills was transforming lively riffing into hermetically sealed precision—seriously, try finding a flaw in any of this tune’s painfully mechanized handclaps and snare hits. Yet the raunchy honesty of the composition wins out, especially when Walsh slices through the track with fiery slide licks. Simultaneously looking back to Frey’s workingman’s-blues origins and foreshadowing his solo adventures in Partytown, “Heartache Tonight” is one of the group’s best lighthearted numbers, a grim referendum on human relationships disguised as a rollicking jam about hooking up. Released as the first single off The Long Run, the tune became the album’s sole No. 1 pop hit. Later, it earned a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.
18. “Try and Love Again” (Hotel California). Meisner was all over the band’s first couple of albums, when lead-vocal duties were distributed democratically, but it wasn’t until the fourth LP that he finally scored a radio hit with “Take It to the Limit.” He should have notched another one with this soaring ballad, but, surprisingly, only three cuts from Hotel California were released as singles. Its unexplored commercial potential notwithstanding, “Try and Love Again” is superb, easily the best solo Meisner composition the band ever recorded. While the lyrics could use some sharpening, the thematic gist is clear and the musical impact is undeniable. Crooning over an elegantly fluid melody while Henley’s double-time hi-hat complements piercing guitar figures from Frey and Walsh, Meisner delivers the same high-tenor romanticism he did on “Take It to the Limit,” only without the showy flourishes. The group’s harmonies kill here, so even though the words inch toward Adult Contemporary treacle, the tune contributes to the LP’s overall effect, injecting hope into an otherwise fatalistic flow. Although “Try and Love Again” is easily overlooked, partially because so many cuts on Hotel California are knockouts and partially because Meisner faded from view soon afterward, the song ranks among the band’s most luscious confections.
17. “In the City” (The Long Run). The Eagles catalog is filled with songs that one member brought to group sessions completely formulated, and “In the City,” written by Walsh and Barry De Vorzon, tops that list. It’s also among the peak achievements of Walsh’s entire repertoire. Created as the theme song for Walter Hill’s stylized gang-violence movie The Warriors, “In the City” first reached the marketplace as a Walsh solo recording. The Eagles cut their own version for The Long Run, improving the original’s instrumental filigrees and polishing the harmony vocals. Particularly in the band version, “In the City” has an irresistible groove, slide-guitar licks so hot you could use them for branding irons, and intoxicating harmonies. The basic track is simultaneously lush and minimalistic, with enough air for the listener to bop along with every bongo hit, and Walsh folds his keening wail into the arrangement perfectly, treating the vocal like part of the guitar line. When the vamp hits, “In the City” shifts into a minute of pure sonic pleasure, the band seemingly reveling in their own consummate musicianship as they ride the steady waves of the uplifting melody. Walsh’s propensity for novelty songs and rave-ups makes it easy to forget there’s poetry in his soul, but “In the City” proves he’s an artist first and a court jester second.
16. “The Sad Café” (The Long Run). Since the Eagles couldn’t have known The Long Run would be their last album for a decade and a half, it’s amazing they gave their first act such a perfect closing statement. Written by Frey, Henley, Souther, and Walsh, “The Sad Café” is a veiled homage to restaurant/singles hangout Dan Tana’s and/or the joint’s next-door neighbor on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Troubadour. Different Eagles offer different interpretations, but either way, these are the places where the band’s story began. “The Sad Café” is also a thoughtful rumination on the vagaries of fame. Opening with images suggesting the remorseless passage of time, the song segues into nostalgic recollections of the moment when counterculture kids felt the world was theirs. Using just the right combination of idealism and regret, Henley sings, “We thought we could change the world with words like ‘love’ and ‘freedom.’” Throughout the number, the melody is a soft caress. A critical listener could describe the song’s light instrumentation as enervated, and, indeed, there’s an audible weariness to the close-harmony singing in the middle of the song, but the sense of bearing heavy burdens mirrors the lyrics. “I don’t know why fortune shines on some,” Henley sings in the tune’s best line, “and lets the rest go free.” Griping about success? Not really. Acknowledging how the limitless possibilities of wanting success give way to the grinding pressures of sustaining same? More like it. Following some gorgeous acoustic soloing by Felder, a high-flying bridge, and a final vocal passage that takes the form of an invitation to revel in sweet memories of simpler times, the song closes with buttery sax from guest player David Sanborn and then fades, closing the door on the Eagles as a recording entity until they surmounted their friction with “Get Over It.”
15. “Bitter Creek” (Desperado). Virtually a Leadon solo track featuring his bandmates as accompanists (Leadon wrote the tune, sings the lead vocal, and fills the frame with expressive acoustic-guitar hues), “Bitter Creek” finds the Eagles at their most cinematic. Starting with tight little pinches low on the neck of an acoustic guitar, the song transitions from subtly unnerving dissonance to a clip-clop groove, evoking images of a cowboy riding through dangerous territory in fading light. Then Leadon slides into the story. Cryptic and specific at the same time, the narrative hints at danger, loss, pride, and many other things, neither withholding so much detail that the listener is lost nor providing so many guideposts that the song becomes limited to one interpretation. Like “Hotel California,” this one’s a dark mood piece, but with even more deliberately sustained tension. The band’s harmonies enter as a response to Leadon’s first utterance of the title, and thereafter the other singers shadow Leadon, ghosts in the gloom as our doomed cowboy plunges deeper into the night, with glory or oblivion waiting ahead.
Once the lyric plays out just after the three-minute mark, the song undergoes a sly transformation, changing from a warning to an incantation. For the last two minutes of the number, Leadon complements his rhythm parts with impassioned acoustic soloing, all to the accompaniment of dogged “ooh-ooh” harmony vocals. Is the scary vamp of “Bitter Creek” the sound of a mortal facing his final test, the sound of a soul transcending, or something entirely different? Few Eagles songs contain so much mystery, but perhaps a clue can be found in the sequencing. Tracked between the where-have-all-the-good-times-gone ruminations of “Saturday Night” and the no-one-gets-out-alive finality of “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise),” Leadon’s “Bitter Creek” says something profound about the impossibility of reconciling dreams of immortality with the cold fact of human impermanence.
14. “After the Thrill Is Gone” (One of These Nights). Yet another fantastic deep cut from the band’s fourth album, “After the Thrill Is Gone” is one of the paramount achievements of the Henley-Frey collaboration. They wrote the song together and sang it that way, with Frey handling the verses and Henley the choruses—sort of. Ingeniously structured, the tune doesn’t have a traditional verse-chorus pattern, instead moving from two low-key stanzas into a pair of escalating couplets before settling back down for another stanza, a wrenching guitar solo by Felder, a repeat of the escalating couplets, and then, in a thematically relevant return to solid ground, a final twist on the low-key stanzas that leads into a vamp on the title phrase and, rather than a fade, a distinct ending.
The song is just as graceful and self-assured lyrically as it is musically, cascading from one great turn of phrase to the next: “Empty pages and a frozen pen,” “Half the distance takes you twice as long,” and, voicing the anxiety that lurks inside the heart of every popular entertainer, “You’re afraid you might fall out of fashion.” The lyric is so well-written that it doesn’t matter whether the listener interprets the song as a eulogy for a romance that’s lost its spark or a sad commentary by rockers who’ve become too accustomed to success. It’s both of those things because, after all, what is a rock career except a love affair between music and musician? In its quiet way, “After the Thrill Is Gone” is one of the great songs about the disconnect between the two halves of the term “show business.”
Oh, and points to the exec at Asylum who positioned this number as the closing song on 1982’s Eagles Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, a de facto obit for the band’s first run. Way to twist the knife, dude.
13. “Already Gone” (On the Border). Having contributed “Peaceful Easy Feeling” to the band’s first album, Tempchin resurfaced with this playful rave-up. (Robb Strandlund cowrote the tune.) Sung by Frey with a winning mixture of humor and macho posturing, it’s a straightforward I’m-outta-here number, with only the tiniest inklings of a larger statement. What earns the song such a high spot on this list, besides the high-octane groove and the top-shelf vocal, is the vigor of the band’s attack. This was only the second track to which Felder contributed guitar, and his incandescent playing clearly raised the band’s commitment to another level. On the first album, the band tries to rock out, fumbling with “Chug All Night” and almost getting there with “Tryin’.” On the second album, they flex their muscles on “Outlaw Man” and “Out of Control,” sounding more believably tough. With “Already Gone” and “Good Day in Hell,” the other Felder track on the third album, the Eagles find their missing ingredient, a guitarist who can shred. By charting higher than anything off Desperado, this first single from On the Border forcefully proclaimed the beginning of a new chapter in the Eagles story. They were never going to be the Stones or the Who—skeptical producer Glyn Johns was right about that—but after much trial and error, they successfully integrated heavily amplified fretwork into their country-rock sound, paving the way for explorations beyond the limitations of rootsy songwriting.
12. “Take It to the Limit” (One of These Nights). Meisner’s career pinnacle, and the rare instance of an Eagles song soaring on hooks and melody and vocals, without benefit of a persuasive lyric. (Per the norm, Meisner presented an unfinished sketch to Frey and Henley, who completed the songwriting process.) Offering a vague statement of carpe-diem purpose, the tune takes flight with a majestic rhythm track—heavenly strings lifting a mid-tempo march into rare air—then slides into an irresistible chorus that feels like gospel. Meisner’s plain Midwestern phrasing makes the confounding words seem sincere, and the tune’s authors nail the occasional perfect couplet (“If it all fell to pieces tomorrow, would you still be mine?”). Best of all? Those spectacular high notes. They form the ideal climaxes for this mesmerizing fireworks display of a song. Yet in typical Eagles fashion, there’s a dark side to this huge hit, because Meisner’s reluctance to perform “Take It to the Limit” on tour led to standoffs with Frey, which in turn helped motivate Meisner’s departure from the band. Frey ungallantly put the tune back into the Eagles’ live repertoire during the late ’90s, his attempts at the lead vocal falling well short of Meisner’s thrilling performances. (Since Frey’s death, Vince Gill has served the song reasonably well at Eagles concerts.) Incidentally, Meisner recorded a stripped-down version of “Take It to the Limit” for his 1978 solo debut LP, but that recording also pales in comparison to the glorious version on One of These Nights.
11. “Tequila Sunrise” (Desperado). It’s mind-boggling that Frey and Henley wrote two of their best-ever songs during their first week as collaborators, but the proof is in the anguish of “Desperado” and the ennui of “Tequila Sunrise.” Built around a simple acoustic-guitar figure that’s a little bit Roy Orbison and a little bit Tex-Mex, “Tequila Sunrise” employs mournful steel and warm harmonies to support Frey’s unvarnished vocal. Without overstating the forlorn lyric—thus avoiding the trap of sounding excessively self-pitying—Frey tells one of the world’s oldest stories so persuasively that “Tequila Sunrise” becomes the soundtrack for every guy who’s every been shot down, every guy who’s ever regretted hooking up with the wrong woman, and every guy who knows he’ll probably do the same thing all over again, loneliness surmounting reason every damn time.
19. “Heartache Tonight” (The Long Run). Frey’s old buddy Seger improvised the chorus when the band was stumped about where to take the song, so perhaps the spontaneity of “Heartache Tonight” is what makes it such a vibrant jukebox thumper. (Seger shares songwriting credit with usual suspects Frey and Souther, who started the song together, and Henley, who contributed.) The irony, of course, is that the song’s rhythm track sounds absurdly processed. As always, one of the Eagles’ special skills was transforming lively riffing into hermetically sealed precision—seriously, try finding a flaw in any of this tune’s painfully mechanized handclaps and snare hits. Yet the raunchy honesty of the composition wins out, especially when Walsh slices through the track with fiery slide licks. Simultaneously looking back to Frey’s workingman’s-blues origins and foreshadowing his solo adventures in Partytown, “Heartache Tonight” is one of the group’s best lighthearted numbers, a grim referendum on human relationships disguised as a rollicking jam about hooking up. Released as the first single off The Long Run, the tune became the album’s sole No. 1 pop hit. Later, it earned a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.
18. “Try and Love Again” (Hotel California). Meisner was all over the band’s first couple of albums, when lead-vocal duties were distributed democratically, but it wasn’t until the fourth LP that he finally scored a radio hit with “Take It to the Limit.” He should have notched another one with this soaring ballad, but, surprisingly, only three cuts from Hotel California were released as singles. Its unexplored commercial potential notwithstanding, “Try and Love Again” is superb, easily the best solo Meisner composition the band ever recorded. While the lyrics could use some sharpening, the thematic gist is clear and the musical impact is undeniable. Crooning over an elegantly fluid melody while Henley’s double-time hi-hat complements piercing guitar figures from Frey and Walsh, Meisner delivers the same high-tenor romanticism he did on “Take It to the Limit,” only without the showy flourishes. The group’s harmonies kill here, so even though the words inch toward Adult Contemporary treacle, the tune contributes to the LP’s overall effect, injecting hope into an otherwise fatalistic flow. Although “Try and Love Again” is easily overlooked, partially because so many cuts on Hotel California are knockouts and partially because Meisner faded from view soon afterward, the song ranks among the band’s most luscious confections.
17. “In the City” (The Long Run). The Eagles catalog is filled with songs that one member brought to group sessions completely formulated, and “In the City,” written by Walsh and Barry De Vorzon, tops that list. It’s also among the peak achievements of Walsh’s entire repertoire. Created as the theme song for Walter Hill’s stylized gang-violence movie The Warriors, “In the City” first reached the marketplace as a Walsh solo recording. The Eagles cut their own version for The Long Run, improving the original’s instrumental filigrees and polishing the harmony vocals. Particularly in the band version, “In the City” has an irresistible groove, slide-guitar licks so hot you could use them for branding irons, and intoxicating harmonies. The basic track is simultaneously lush and minimalistic, with enough air for the listener to bop along with every bongo hit, and Walsh folds his keening wail into the arrangement perfectly, treating the vocal like part of the guitar line. When the vamp hits, “In the City” shifts into a minute of pure sonic pleasure, the band seemingly reveling in their own consummate musicianship as they ride the steady waves of the uplifting melody. Walsh’s propensity for novelty songs and rave-ups makes it easy to forget there’s poetry in his soul, but “In the City” proves he’s an artist first and a court jester second.
16. “The Sad Café” (The Long Run). Since the Eagles couldn’t have known The Long Run would be their last album for a decade and a half, it’s amazing they gave their first act such a perfect closing statement. Written by Frey, Henley, Souther, and Walsh, “The Sad Café” is a veiled homage to restaurant/singles hangout Dan Tana’s and/or the joint’s next-door neighbor on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Troubadour. Different Eagles offer different interpretations, but either way, these are the places where the band’s story began. “The Sad Café” is also a thoughtful rumination on the vagaries of fame. Opening with images suggesting the remorseless passage of time, the song segues into nostalgic recollections of the moment when counterculture kids felt the world was theirs. Using just the right combination of idealism and regret, Henley sings, “We thought we could change the world with words like ‘love’ and ‘freedom.’” Throughout the number, the melody is a soft caress. A critical listener could describe the song’s light instrumentation as enervated, and, indeed, there’s an audible weariness to the close-harmony singing in the middle of the song, but the sense of bearing heavy burdens mirrors the lyrics. “I don’t know why fortune shines on some,” Henley sings in the tune’s best line, “and lets the rest go free.” Griping about success? Not really. Acknowledging how the limitless possibilities of wanting success give way to the grinding pressures of sustaining same? More like it. Following some gorgeous acoustic soloing by Felder, a high-flying bridge, and a final vocal passage that takes the form of an invitation to revel in sweet memories of simpler times, the song closes with buttery sax from guest player David Sanborn and then fades, closing the door on the Eagles as a recording entity until they surmounted their friction with “Get Over It.”
15. “Bitter Creek” (Desperado). Virtually a Leadon solo track featuring his bandmates as accompanists (Leadon wrote the tune, sings the lead vocal, and fills the frame with expressive acoustic-guitar hues), “Bitter Creek” finds the Eagles at their most cinematic. Starting with tight little pinches low on the neck of an acoustic guitar, the song transitions from subtly unnerving dissonance to a clip-clop groove, evoking images of a cowboy riding through dangerous territory in fading light. Then Leadon slides into the story. Cryptic and specific at the same time, the narrative hints at danger, loss, pride, and many other things, neither withholding so much detail that the listener is lost nor providing so many guideposts that the song becomes limited to one interpretation. Like “Hotel California,” this one’s a dark mood piece, but with even more deliberately sustained tension. The band’s harmonies enter as a response to Leadon’s first utterance of the title, and thereafter the other singers shadow Leadon, ghosts in the gloom as our doomed cowboy plunges deeper into the night, with glory or oblivion waiting ahead.
Once the lyric plays out just after the three-minute mark, the song undergoes a sly transformation, changing from a warning to an incantation. For the last two minutes of the number, Leadon complements his rhythm parts with impassioned acoustic soloing, all to the accompaniment of dogged “ooh-ooh” harmony vocals. Is the scary vamp of “Bitter Creek” the sound of a mortal facing his final test, the sound of a soul transcending, or something entirely different? Few Eagles songs contain so much mystery, but perhaps a clue can be found in the sequencing. Tracked between the where-have-all-the-good-times-gone ruminations of “Saturday Night” and the no-one-gets-out-alive finality of “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise),” Leadon’s “Bitter Creek” says something profound about the impossibility of reconciling dreams of immortality with the cold fact of human impermanence.
14. “After the Thrill Is Gone” (One of These Nights). Yet another fantastic deep cut from the band’s fourth album, “After the Thrill Is Gone” is one of the paramount achievements of the Henley-Frey collaboration. They wrote the song together and sang it that way, with Frey handling the verses and Henley the choruses—sort of. Ingeniously structured, the tune doesn’t have a traditional verse-chorus pattern, instead moving from two low-key stanzas into a pair of escalating couplets before settling back down for another stanza, a wrenching guitar solo by Felder, a repeat of the escalating couplets, and then, in a thematically relevant return to solid ground, a final twist on the low-key stanzas that leads into a vamp on the title phrase and, rather than a fade, a distinct ending.
The song is just as graceful and self-assured lyrically as it is musically, cascading from one great turn of phrase to the next: “Empty pages and a frozen pen,” “Half the distance takes you twice as long,” and, voicing the anxiety that lurks inside the heart of every popular entertainer, “You’re afraid you might fall out of fashion.” The lyric is so well-written that it doesn’t matter whether the listener interprets the song as a eulogy for a romance that’s lost its spark or a sad commentary by rockers who’ve become too accustomed to success. It’s both of those things because, after all, what is a rock career except a love affair between music and musician? In its quiet way, “After the Thrill Is Gone” is one of the great songs about the disconnect between the two halves of the term “show business.”
Oh, and points to the exec at Asylum who positioned this number as the closing song on 1982’s Eagles Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, a de facto obit for the band’s first run. Way to twist the knife, dude.
13. “Already Gone” (On the Border). Having contributed “Peaceful Easy Feeling” to the band’s first album, Tempchin resurfaced with this playful rave-up. (Robb Strandlund cowrote the tune.) Sung by Frey with a winning mixture of humor and macho posturing, it’s a straightforward I’m-outta-here number, with only the tiniest inklings of a larger statement. What earns the song such a high spot on this list, besides the high-octane groove and the top-shelf vocal, is the vigor of the band’s attack. This was only the second track to which Felder contributed guitar, and his incandescent playing clearly raised the band’s commitment to another level. On the first album, the band tries to rock out, fumbling with “Chug All Night” and almost getting there with “Tryin’.” On the second album, they flex their muscles on “Outlaw Man” and “Out of Control,” sounding more believably tough. With “Already Gone” and “Good Day in Hell,” the other Felder track on the third album, the Eagles find their missing ingredient, a guitarist who can shred. By charting higher than anything off Desperado, this first single from On the Border forcefully proclaimed the beginning of a new chapter in the Eagles story. They were never going to be the Stones or the Who—skeptical producer Glyn Johns was right about that—but after much trial and error, they successfully integrated heavily amplified fretwork into their country-rock sound, paving the way for explorations beyond the limitations of rootsy songwriting.
12. “Take It to the Limit” (One of These Nights). Meisner’s career pinnacle, and the rare instance of an Eagles song soaring on hooks and melody and vocals, without benefit of a persuasive lyric. (Per the norm, Meisner presented an unfinished sketch to Frey and Henley, who completed the songwriting process.) Offering a vague statement of carpe-diem purpose, the tune takes flight with a majestic rhythm track—heavenly strings lifting a mid-tempo march into rare air—then slides into an irresistible chorus that feels like gospel. Meisner’s plain Midwestern phrasing makes the confounding words seem sincere, and the tune’s authors nail the occasional perfect couplet (“If it all fell to pieces tomorrow, would you still be mine?”). Best of all? Those spectacular high notes. They form the ideal climaxes for this mesmerizing fireworks display of a song. Yet in typical Eagles fashion, there’s a dark side to this huge hit, because Meisner’s reluctance to perform “Take It to the Limit” on tour led to standoffs with Frey, which in turn helped motivate Meisner’s departure from the band. Frey ungallantly put the tune back into the Eagles’ live repertoire during the late ’90s, his attempts at the lead vocal falling well short of Meisner’s thrilling performances. (Since Frey’s death, Vince Gill has served the song reasonably well at Eagles concerts.) Incidentally, Meisner recorded a stripped-down version of “Take It to the Limit” for his 1978 solo debut LP, but that recording also pales in comparison to the glorious version on One of These Nights.
11. “Tequila Sunrise” (Desperado). It’s mind-boggling that Frey and Henley wrote two of their best-ever songs during their first week as collaborators, but the proof is in the anguish of “Desperado” and the ennui of “Tequila Sunrise.” Built around a simple acoustic-guitar figure that’s a little bit Roy Orbison and a little bit Tex-Mex, “Tequila Sunrise” employs mournful steel and warm harmonies to support Frey’s unvarnished vocal. Without overstating the forlorn lyric—thus avoiding the trap of sounding excessively self-pitying—Frey tells one of the world’s oldest stories so persuasively that “Tequila Sunrise” becomes the soundtrack for every guy who’s every been shot down, every guy who’s ever regretted hooking up with the wrong woman, and every guy who knows he’ll probably do the same thing all over again, loneliness surmounting reason every damn time.
