Every Eagles Song Ranked: Songs 40-31

40. “Busy Being Fabulous” (Long Road Out of Eden). Something of a sequel to “Life in the Fast Lane,” critiquing grownups who can’t leave their hard-partying ways behind, “Busy Being Fabulous” is the best of the new Henley-Frey songs on Long Road, thanks to its winning combination of relatable lyrics and countrified hooks. Gliding along on a mid-tempo beat that easily supports thick harmonies and the occasional delicate instrumental flourish, the track lives on the lighter side of the Henley-Frey songbook, less a comprehensive treatise and more a pithy critique. There’s also a certain been-there/done-that quality, inasmuch as the Eagles had already crafted more than a few songs about people with frail grasps on the big picture. Considered from a fan’s perspective, however, the song finds the band’s top songwriters revisiting a core theme with new maturity and wisdom. What’s more, “Busy Being Fabulous” is beautifully rendered—each verse forms the setup for a caustic punchline, the dense chorus allows the listener to luxuriate in the signature Eagles sound, and the song runs a satisfying four minutes, just enough to fully explore its lyrical and musical ideas. The tune gained some traction in the marketplace, hitting No. 28 on the Country chart and No. 12 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

39. “Doolin-Dalton” & “Doolin-Dalton (Instrumental)” & “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise)” (Desperado). Excepting perhaps the group’s stillborn attempt at a reunion in 1990, here’s the most interesting near-miss in the Eagles saga: maverick filmmaker Sam Peckinpah briefly considered transforming the group’s cowboy album into a movie. To see the material’s cinematic potential, examine the photos on the LP’s sleeve, taken by Henry Diltz during an adventurous session—which also involved Browne and Souther—at an old Western-movie location in the hills above Malibu. Singer-songwriter Ned Doheny, the story goes, gave Browne a coffee-table book about gunfighters, and upon seeing the book, the Eagles zeroed in on the real-life story of the Doolin-Dalton gang, sensing potential for a parallel between robbers and rockers. Written by Browne, Frey, Henley, and Souther, the album’s opener, “Doolin-Dalton,” has a great high-lonesome quality, with Frey’s anguished harmonica strains bouncing off the ballad’s arena-sized rhythms like coyote calls in a canyon. Yet the song is really just a prologue, establishing the characters and mood for the album. “Doolin-Dalton” gets an instrumental callback near the top of side two, and it returns again during the album’s beautiful finale, “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise).” Inserting additional lyrics as a means of concluding the album’s narrative, this effective fusion of two tracks eventually becomes a gigantic round that’s pure Zane Grey mythmaking. Elegantly capping the rock parallel are these lines: “Is there gonna be anything left? Only stardust.” The notion comes across that in the same way gunfighters leave in their wakes slabs on Boot Hill and some tall tales, rockers leave behind their music. This romantic analogy reflects the self-assuredness of young songwriters determined to earn their places in the pop-music pantheon. Decades of subsequent Eagles success prove the men behind that analogy eventually made good on their boasts.
 
38. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (Hotel California). Side two of the Eagles’ best album features some of the most delicate musicianship in the band’s entire catalog. Coming out of the acidic “Victim of Love,” side two’s dreamy stretch begins with this Walsh cut, continues with Meisner’s gorgeous “Try and Love Again,” and concludes with the magisterial woe of “The Last Resort.” Lyrically, “Pretty Maids,” composed by Walsh and his old Barnstorm bandmate Joe Vitale, is the weakest of the three because except for some strangely evocative phrases about the fleeting nature of life, “Pretty Maids” is more of a mood piece than a narrative. Musically, however, it’s crisp and resonant. Over a minimalistic beat defined by airy breaks—huge snare hits punctuating dramatic pauses—Walsh uses guitars and keyboards to paint clouds in a dusky sky, taking listeners to some reflective place where they can add their own specificity of circumstance to the generalized sighs and sways and swoons. Walsh injects his vocals with a rare degree of vulnerability, giving the effect of a shy guy revealing himself to a sympathetic listener. There’s something sexy about the number, as well, thanks to the cascading harmonies and that smooth slide-guitar lead, a steady hand on the small of a partner’s back during an intimate pas de deux.
 
37. “Saturday Night” (Desperado). This deep cut was an offbeat selection to open concerts on the History of the Eagles tour, though Frey and Henley clearly wanted to make a statement by appearing together onstage before other band members emerged—call it Rewriting the History of the Eagles. After all, the composition of “Saturday Night” was begun by Meisner and completed with help from the other original band members. Furthermore, the recorded version is such a group effort—Leadon decorating the track with mandolin washes, Meisner singing a few lines—that reducing it to an acoustic duet lessens the song’s beauty. Worse, repurposing the song underscores the ungallant nature of the band’s fractious dynamics; at the end of the day, it’s all about Don and Glenn, so hit the road if you’ve got a problem with that, pal. In any event, this effectively world-weary song is told from the perspective of men realizing youth has slipped into the rear-view mirror. Bittersweet and tender, the tune articulates the same hard-won wisdom—or uncanny prescience, given how young the Eagles were when they cut this material—as the same album’s “Desperado” and “Tequila Sunrise.” Solid stuff.
 
36. “How Long” (Long Road Out of Eden). It’s a safe bet the overwhelming majority of fans who pushed the first official Long Road single up the Adult Contemporary and Country charts glossed right over the song’s original intentions. Written by Souther and included on his 1972 debut album, the tune was part of the Eagles’ live set back in the day, its boppy rhythms and sweet harmonies masking a topical narrative about a Vietnam War deserter. When the Eagles resurrected the song in 2007, it became a perfect invitation to their audience—whereas “Get Over It” told fans the Eagles could still lay down macho grooves, “How Long” sent the comforting message that the “Take It Easy” guys could still manufacture cotton-candy sonics. Featuring a vocal split between Frey and Henley, “How Long” is a blast whether you probe the lyrics or simply ride the song’s pleasing textures. Galloping assuredly through a rangy melody, the band sounds fantastic, their playing as taut as their close-harmony singing. (Fittingly, the track won the Eagles a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.) To fully appreciate the propulsion of this song, track down video of the band performing “How Long” on TV in the mid-’70s, because their back-in-the-day take on the song, all raunchy guitars and strutting confidence, smokes the Long Road version—some tunes are better suited to passion than precision.
 
35. “Waiting in the Weeds” (Long Road Out of Eden). With all due respect to that song’s noble sociopolitical aspirations, forget “Long Road Out of Eden.” The real epic worth discussing on the band’s last album is “Waiting in the Weeds,” a breathtaking ballad running nearly eight minutes and featuring some of the most beautiful lyrical and musical imagery that Henley, who cowrote the song with Smith, has ever conjured. Ostensibly a bittersweet romantic tale told from the perspective of a man watching in anguish as his lost love throws her affections at an undeserving rival, it is also, as Henley has noted, a veiled statement about the band circa the mid-2000s. The romantic rival in the song (“He’s the darling of the chic”) is a stand-in for some of the musical horrors that dominated the pop charts while the Eagles were sequestered in the recording studio. And if that sounds like another shot of back-in-my-day crankiness from Henley, who turned 60 shortly before Long Road was released, he justifies his scorn by countering the Auto-Tuned emptiness of boy bands and pop tarts with the handmade intricacy of the guitar parts and overlapping harmonies that drive “Waiting in the Weeds.” (Translation: “Lemme show you how it’s done, kids.”) Some of the wordplay is positively sublime, as when the end of one phrase, “the flavor of the week,” becomes the beginning of another, “is melting down your pretty summer dress.” And the melody is truly haunting. Finally, the tension of the bridge gives way to the grandeur of the third chorus, evoking sunbeams breaking through clouds after a summer storm, and the multilayered round that takes shape during the closing chorus is on par with the band’s finest moments of recorded performance. To this writer’s ears, only the closing vamp of “Hollywood Waltz” is more achingly pretty than the last stretch of “Waiting in the Weeds.”
 
34. “Peaceful Easy Feeling” (Eagles). Prominently featuring the word “easy” in the titles of two cuts on their first album had the effect of putting targets on the Eagles’ backs, critically speaking, and the fact that both tunes became classic hits only made things worse. For decades, wags opined that “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Take It Easy” were panaceas during turbulent times and nothing more. Had the Eagles produced only upbeat songs about overcoming life’s difficulties, the critique would have been valid. What’s more, “Take It Easy” is a deceptive song, since the narrative implies the protagonist might continue a losing pattern by hooking up with the girl in the flatbed Ford; he is the unreconstructed Me Generation male, feeding his desires and kicking the notion of consequences down the road. The main character in Tempchin’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling” doesn’t think nearly as deeply, though it’s hard to imagine any woman wanting to stone him, like the bed-hopper in “Take It Easy.” Pretty, rural, and warm, “Peaceful Easy Feeling” paints romantic word pictures with the first verse, those earrings and skin “beneath a billion stars,” but it’s not just a come-on. Rather, it’s the earthy overture of a longhair in denim seeking communion with another soul—which just happens to occupy a comely physique. Frey’s tender vocal also marks the beginning of his lifelong association with Tempchin, who became his writing partner after the initial dissolution of the Henley-Frey team.
 
33. “Those Shoes” (The Long Run). It’s a shame Frey and Felder developed such animosity toward each other, because when those two joined forces with Henley (and sometimes Souther), the collaboration worked. Telling a dark story about a young woman enduring the indignities of the singles scene (“You’re so smooth and the world’s so rough”), “Those Shoes” blends a menacing groove with fierce attacks of electric and slide guitars to create a frightening Looking for Mr. Goodbar vibe. Whereas the other nihilistic cuts on The Long Run have distracting shortcomings, “Those Shoes” represents the apogee of the band’s nadir, if you will—only songwriters intimately familiar with the shame of prowling for empty gratification could express this specific piece of the human experience so truthfully. Written by Felder, Frey, and Henley, the song captures the Eagles at their most supple—the call-and-response section pairing Henley’s vicious lead vocal with otherworldly Greek Chorus harmonies—and their most cruel. The talk-box guitar stuff at the end has a wonderfully evil quality, even when you discover that the voices blending into the guitar notes are singing repetitions of “butt out.” (Felder and Walsh play in tandem for a while, and Walsh handles the big solo.) Delivering some of his strongest percussion on the Long Run LP, Henley adds dark edges throughout the song with clanking ride-cymbal hits and strafing-run tom fills.
 
32. “Good Day in Hell” (On the Border). In his score-settling memoir, Felder describes being welcomed to the Eagles by his old buddy Leadon, who whispered: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” By all reports, the pickup sessions for this track—during which Felder played blazing slide licks, his first contributions to the group’s recorded output—echoed the song’s title. If life among the Eagles was hell when the musicians fought with each other, this was indeed a good day. The excitement of a “late arrival,” as Felder was billed on the resulting album’s sleeve, made for a break from the torments of the damned. Even though it’s greatly elevated by Felder’s quicksilver playing, the basic track is terrific, a darkly funny twist on “Take It Easy.” Whereas the protagonist of that song hopes for salvation in the form of a kindhearted woman, the guy suffering through a “Good Day in Hell” accepts his lot in life, with the recurring line “tomorrow I’ll be glory bound” coming across like some small-town dreamer’s empty promises that, tomorrow, damn it, he’ll finally leave for the big city. (Some reports indicate that, like the same album’s “My Man,” this tune was inspired by Gram Parsons.) Throughout the song, the countrified funk of the melody reflects the seedy appeal of living below one’s moral standards. Underscoring how cohesive a music-making unit Henley and Frey had become, they not only wrote the song together but also sang the verses in unison, an effect they didn’t repeat until “King of Hollywood” several years later.
 
31. “Certain Kind of Fool” (Desperado). Like “Take It to the Limit,” this was a Meisner song fragment that Henley and Frey helped complete, and it’s a fine synthesis of their abilities. Drawing, perhaps, on his own heartland upbringing, Meisner, who sings the lead, tells a vivid story about a young man dazzled by the six-shooter—or the Les Paul, depending on how you read the number—that he spots in a store window. Practicing until “he knew he could stand with the best,” the boy sets out for glory, little suspecting how closely notoriety and infamy are linked. The key line, “It’s a certain kind of fool who likes to hear the sound of his own name,” could just as easily be said about a rocker as an outlaw, so this tight track hits the album’s theme with the precision of a bullet blasting through a target. The song’s measured pace, which picks up speed during the chorus, supports Leadon’s emotive guitars just as strongly as it supports Meisner’s plaintive wails, giving the brief tune memorable widescreen impact.

Every Eagles Song Ranked: Songs 50-41

 

50. “Business as Usual” (Long Road Out of Eden). Henley spent the first decade of his solo career transforming righteous indignation into an art form. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that one of the best tracks he contributed to Long Road is a snarling screed, cowritten with Smith, about the cross-pollination between business, money, and politics. Sonically, “Business as Usual” is yet another Long Road track that seems to have emerged from an earlier time; the tune would have fit perfectly on Henley’s 1989 The End of the Innocence LP, right down to the beating-a-dead-horse repetition of the phrase “soul-sucking.” (Once Henley gets his teeth into a juicy aphorism, he’s loath to let go.) Giving the tune extra muscle is an intense tempo and a ground-assault arrangement—heavy drums, moody harmonies, and slashing guitars cohere with the tough lyrics to form a bleak but powerful statement. Whereas too many Long Road rants resemble sloppy carpet-bombing, this one’s a lethal drone strike.
 
49. “Take the Devil” (Eagles). Anyone doubting Meisner’s versatility need only listen to the three cuts he sings on the band’s first LP. Interpreting Frey’s “Most of Us Are Sad,” he’s a high-lonesome troubadour. Delivering his own “Tryin’,” he’s a blue-collar rocker. And in his best moment on Eagles, he’s a storyteller nearly of Henley’s caliber. Written by Meisner, the song itself isn’t fantastic, another spooky grind pulled from the same poisoned well the band tapped for “Witchy Woman,” but, together with his buddies’ big-canvas performances, Meisner’s singing elevates the piece to something eerily beautiful. Bearing a resemblance to CSN’s “Wooden Ships,” the tune starts small and gets big, suggesting a vessel sailing into foreboding waters before getting swallowed by an apocalyptic storm. Meisner’s vocals are emotional and authoritative, climaxing with a chilling high note before the track settles into a minute and a half of fierce vamping.
 
48. “Do Something” (Long Road Out of Eden). Lost amid the vapid love songs the band threw Schmit’s way while chasing the success of “I Can’t Tell You Why” is this earnest country ballad about exactly what the title suggests—making the most of life because “you’re not ready for the rocking chair.” While not the most challenging song, “Do Something” expresses a poignant theme for middle-aged musicians tackling new material instead of simply coasting on their old hits. Written by Henley, Schmit, and Smith, the tune has a pleasing blend of lyricism and twang. Better still, the give-and-take vocals between Henley and Schmit toward the end convey camaraderie while also juxtaposing the band’s gentlest voice with its toughest.
 
47. “The Disco Strangler” (The Long Run). The title alone makes the song dated, but it’s not as if the Eagles dove wholeheartedly into late-’70s dance-floor fashion the way that, say, ELO or KISS did. Exactly the opposite. Except for the snapping hi-hat, this one’s all about sticking it to disco—and the debauched culture it represents. Felder steers the song with one of his most blistering hooks, as nasty as it is nocturnal, while Henley supports the guitar with a groove as twitchy a tweaker’s heartbeat. Henley’s lead vocal is all slap and slice, mercilessly describing the seductive powers of avarice, lust, and narcissism all the way to the lethal climax. Songs like “The Disco Strangler” contribute to the band’s not-undeserved reputation for biting the hand that feeds, since they enjoyed partying so much that it’s disingenuous for them to judge others for doing the same, but the attitude works for “The Disco Strangler” in a way it doesn’t for “King of Hollywood.” Rather than using an outside-in perspective, “The Disco Strangler” captures the late ’70s with such immediacy you can almost see the jittery band members gnashing their teeth as the blow hits their systems.
 
46. “Most of Us Are Sad” (Eagles). After Frey died, Leadon expressed his admiration for “Most of Us Are Sad,” a deep cut from the band’s first album that Frey wrote and Meisner sang. While the melancholy ballad’s lyric is self-explanatory, Leadon correctly noted that it reflects a simple truth—we all get blue sometimes. On a deeper level, the song reveals something about Frey that he rarely expressed in his music. He generally played the roles of the cool observer, the party animal, the smooth-talking stud, and the tough guy. By penning “Most of Us Are Sad,” he showed unadorned vulnerability. One could easily play pop-culture shrink by postulating that he stepped away from the mic when the time came to record the song because he knew that he’d exposed a nerve, though the real explanation is probably more mundane, something to do with making sure band members had parity on the first LP. In any event, “Most of Us Are Sad” is an affecting track that Meisner serves well.
 
45. “Outlaw Man” (Desperado). Speaking of Frey the tough guy, take a few steps back out of respect for this badass number written by David Blue because “Outlaw Man” is a key part of the six-gun symphony that comprises the band’s only outright concept album. Whether you take the song literally, a frontier robber warning a woman not to get close because he could die any minute, or whether you take it metaphorically, the rock star as high plains drifter, it’s an attitudinal jolt, with the heavy reverb on Frey’s vocal lending a suitably mythic quality. A dissenter could quibble that the group-harmony flourishes unhelpfully soften the track. Yet once Frey leads the band charging out of the second chorus like they’ve just knocked off the First National Trust—Meisner’s throbbing bass notes echoing racing hoofbeats—the tune approaches the excitement of a Howard Hawks oater.
 
44. “Is It True?” (On the Border). Calling this attractive song typical of Meisner’s early output isn’t exactly a compliment, and it’s not exactly a condemnation. A mid-tempo number about the girl who got away and the man who’s matured enough to realize it was his fault, the song is straightforward country rock executed by the genre’s most polished practitioners, with Frey’s nimble slide-guitar accents lending scope. In many ways, this is the most satisfying solo composition Meisner brought to the band short of “Try and Love Again,” as the cut benefits from not only economy but also execution. “Is It True?” makes its point in three minutes and change, just long enough to tell the story but not long enough to demand more complexity. Better still, the band was in such a good pocket when they cut On the Border that the playing couldn’t be smoother.
 
43. “On the Border” (On the Border). Despite featuring the band’s muddiest lyrics this side of “Take It to the Limit,” the title track from the Eagles’ strong third album—the symbolic end of their twang time—has so many interesting feels and hooks and turns of phrase that it’s a great listen. (Frey, Henley, and Leadon share writing credit.) The groove combines funk and soul elements into something loud and rude, the sound of the guy you bumped into on the street who’s ready for a fight. However, the track’s also filled with humor—the mid-song stretch during which each Eagle sings a line in succession conveys playfulness and unity, two qualities in short supply during the band’s darkest periods. Henley leans into the R&B side of his musical persona with a vengeance on this one, and by the time the song settles into the vamp-and-trill outro, the Eagles let a little Booker T. & the M.G.’s grit into their usual please-don’t-spill-crumbs-on-the-carpet vibe.
 
42. “Too Many Hands” (One of These Nights). The only Meisner-Felder composition, “Too Many Hands” would have benefited from a Henley lyric pass, but the central idea is so cogent and the musicality is so powerful that the track overcomes its verbal shortcomings. Meisner’s springy bassline and Felder’s all-over-the-neck pyrotechnics amplify the anguish of the song’s observations about a beautiful woman transferring her affections from one unworthy lover to the next, even though “her heart is still yearning to be found.” Meisner delivers an authoritative lead vocal, Henley’s percussion helps give the song its sinister propulsion, Frey trades squawking electric figures with Felder during the dual-guitar solo, and all five Eagles circa 1975 contribute spooky harmony refrains. Casting its spell for nearly five minutes, “Too Many Hands” is one of the group’s most atmospheric deep cuts.
 
41. “Get Over It” (Hell Freezes Over). What a thrill to hear Walsh’s revving-engine opening licks on the radio in early 1994, confirmation that the impossible had finally happened, that hell had indeed frozen over. Featuring one of Henley-Frey’s chattiest lyrics and, as Frey has said, straight-up Chuck Berry guitars, “Get Over It” is a middle finger not only to the self-involved whiners pilloried in the song but also to the haters. The critics who never got behind the idea of the Eagles as rockers. The detractors who cheered when Mojo Nixon sang “Don Henley must die—don’t let him get back together with Glenn Frey!” The gripers who consigned the Eagles to the corporate-rock slagheap. With its punchy verses, confrontational choruses, and pedal-to-the-metal guitars, “Get Over It” announced the Eagles were back and ready to rumble, with something to say about a whole new generation of self-involved jerks. Kinder and gentler? Not quite. “I’d like to find your inner child,” Henley snarls, “and kick its little ass.” Preach!

Every Eagles Song Ranked: Songs 70-51

70. “Frail Grasp on the Big Picture” (Long Road Out of Eden). This cranky/funny Henley-Frey cowrite is something of a cousin to “Get Over It,” an earlier collaborative endeavor with more economy and focus. Offering a shotgun-spray lament about Americans failing to recognize how they’re being manipulated by corporate goons and government overlords, this track has the feel of Henley randomly bitching about the day’s headlines while Frey fires back with zingers. On the ominous side of the track are hopeless remarks (“light fading and the fog is getting thicker”), and on the c’est-la-vie side are pithy ones (“You keep on rubbing that, you’re gonna get a blister”). Especially considering the inherent pomposity of the narrative approach (“I’ve seen it all before”), aiming at so many thematic targets diffuses the impact. So, too, does an awkward shift from the rubbery funk of the song proper to the almost Roger Waters-esque loftiness of the bridge. By the time the number runs its course close to the six-minute mark, it’s gotten old—as in “get off my lawn” old. Call it too much of a so-so thing.

 

69. “I Dreamed There Was No War” (Long Road Out of Eden). Given his affection for acting in movies and cutting film/TV theme songs, it’s strange Frey never made the logical leap of scoring a feature, especially since instrumentals like this one proved his capacity for sonic grandeur with an Aaron Copland flavor. Featuring a restrained Stratocaster floating over string washes, “I Dreamed There Was No War” is such an involving piece of music that the title does it a disservice. Sure, it works as a prayer for peace, and none would ever question the necessity for more of those. But it also works as a man singing through his instrument, exploring notes on the scale his voice can’t reach, and in so doing expressing feelings for which there are no words. The track won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

 

68. “Tryin’” (Eagles). Although Meisner’s strongest moment on the band’s first album is the dramatic “Take the Devil,” he acquits himself well on this straight-up rocker, which he wrote. In some ways a thematic precursor to “Take It to the Limit,” inasmuch as it hits the same you-gotta-be-in-to-win-it theme, the tune has momentum, savage fretwork, and tasty harmonizing. Like so much of Meisner’s solo work, alas, it’s a filler track, too derivative and underdeveloped to fully capture the listener’s imagination. That said, “Tryin’” works well as the last cut on the Eagles’ debut LP, capturing the musicians’ collective determination to graduate from comers to chart-toppers.

 

67. “What Do I Do With My Heart” (Long Road Out of Eden). Frey once said of Henley, “Without Don, we’d be Air Supply,” wryly acknowledging his own tendency for penning featherweight love songs. As “What Do I Do With My Heart” proves, sometimes the Eagles became Air Supply even with Henley’s participation. The slightest of the new Henley-Frey compositions on Long Road, this AC ballad features laughably clichéd lyrics, but it’s redeemed by an excitingly ascending melody and the fun of hearing Frey and Henley sing a full duet. Previously, they split vocals every so often (examples span “Doolin-Dalton” to “How Long”), but the end of “What Do I Do With My Heart” intermingles Henley’s R&B-inflected line readings with Frey’s blue-eyed-soul ad-libs. Still, one wishes they’d gone the “Victim of Love” route and cut this one live because the combination of a ’90s-sounding click track, overly precise audio editing, and the unfortunate dissonance of sustained “r” sounds make the track antiseptic and brittle. It’s letter-perfect in a bad way, more ProTools than professional.

 

66. “Twenty-One” (Desperado). The Eagles’ second album doesn’t have any truly weak songs, if only because each number is part of a larger diorama, but “Twenty-One” is the runt of the litter. Written and sung by Leadon, whose banjo/dobro picking enlivens the track’s scant 2-minute, 11-second running time, the number makes a simple point quickly, expressing the invulnerability of youth with appropriate levels of musical exuberance. Tracked between “Doolin-Dalton,” which sets up the concept album’s characters, and “Out of Control,” which depicts how easily youthful abandon becomes recklessness, “Twenty-One” is effective. As a stand-alone track, it’s a base hit down the middle at best. Incidentally, the Meisner-sung “Midnight Flyer,” on the band’s next album, is a virtual soundalike for “Twenty-One,” complete with another helping of Leadon’s expert banjo playing.

 

65. “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks” (The Long Run). A fair argument could be made for rating this oddity higher, simply because it’s the funniest song the Eagles ever cut. Given their preference for ambitious narratives, however, the fleeting 2-minute, 21-second duration of this musical tribute to frat-boy mischief reveals its nature as a throwaway that went the distance simply because the band lacked better ideas. (Think of “Greeks” as “Born to Boogie” taken to full term.) Had the Eagles been more prolific, larks like this one would have felt more deserving of inclusion on the band’s LPs. Given their snail’s-pace work ethic, however, a noisy riff about collegiate high jinks feels out of place not only on The Long Run but also within the overall Henley-Frey songbook. Oh, well. The line about vomiting never fails to elicit a smile, and the song’s humor proves that droll worked for Henley and Frey whenever they went there. Jimmy Buffett contributes to the shout-along choruses and outro.

 

64. “I Wish You Peace” (One of These Nights). Fittingly, Leadon sings the last song on his final Eagles album. Much to Henley’s reported consternation, the songwriting credit for “I Wish You Peace” is split between Leadon and his then-girlfriend, Patti Davis, better known as Ronald Reagan’s daughter. (No Reagan fan, Henley later sang about the Great Communicator as “that tired old man we elected king.”) “I Wish You Peace” has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as Leadon’s big On the Border number, “My Man.” It’s a pretty, countrified ballad with a Zen vibe, soft enough to support Leadon’s thin voice in the lead position and supple enough to expand when harmony vocals join the mix. If it’s possible for a song to be excessively gentle, this one fits the bill. Yet it’s difficult not to feel a sense of loss while listening to “I Wish You Peace.” Eagles 2.0 scored without Leadon on Hotel California, but the group sure as hell could have used his rootsy authenticity while making The Long Run, which has too much chilly meticulousness and not enough warm soulfulness.

 

63. “Fast Company” (Long Road Out of Eden). Blending a Henley falsetto vocal with nervous-energy funk that recalls “The Disco Strangler,” “Fast Company” is such a throwback that it wouldn’t be surprising to learn it was conceived during the Long Run sessions. The retro vibe extends beyond the sonics. Given the adjective in the title, it’s impossible not to draw parallels to “Life in the Fast Lane,” and, sure enough, the track warns Beautiful Young People about leaving their humanity behind in the quest for fleeting thrills. (The band castigated grown-up versions of such people with another Long Road track, “Busy Being Fabulous.”) For all of its reaching back to the past, “Fast Company” also reflects the indignities of aging, because Henley garbles phrasing on the bridge, a rare slip for someone who values enunciation so highly. (Try deciphering the “raging fire” bit without consulting the lyric sheet.) The track also has one of the limpest dramatic breaks in the Eagles catalog, second only to that woeful drum fill in “I Can’t Tell You Why.”

 

62. “Nightingale” (Eagles). “Take It Easy,” the incomplete Browne song that Frey finished, wasn’t the only pull the Eagles made from Browne’s songbook for their debut LP. Closing out side one, “Nightingale” provides a terrific segue from Frey’s reflective “Most of Us Are Sad,” and it also represents (no pun intended) that rarest of birds—an unabashedly cheerful song with a Henley vocal. Bouncy, rootsy, and thick, the tune is a toe-tapper with a rural feel. It’s among the Eagles’ best trifles.

 

61. “King of Hollywood” (The Long Run). If the song’s narrative landed somewhere other than a dick joke, “King of Hollywood” would be much higher on this list. Even though it’s another slowly paced diatribe, this one’s got it all over “Teenage Jail.” Beginning with a fade-in, subtly suggesting listeners are about to hear a story that’s been happening forever and will keep happening long into the future, the track segues into a dark, probing rhythm pattern balanced by creepy-crawly guitar figures. (Felder, Frey, and Walsh each play solos.) Frey and Henley sing in tandem, describing the way a showbiz lech lures lovelies to his casting couch, and as the song advances through six and a half minutes of psychosexual malignancy, the mood grows more and more oppressive, even though the music is darkly alluring. This is Henley-Frey storytelling at its most controlled, specific, and tight—poetic cynicism, if you will—but their inability to stick the landing kills the buzz. Not only is the punchline too easy, but the climactic joke keeps the song mired in the muck of one scumbag’s small world instead of providing a bigger statement about the way the Dream Factory turns people into cogs. Still, pity the poor bastard Henley and Frey used as the model for their protagonist if he ever recognized himself in the unflinching lyrics.

 

60. “You Are Not Alone” (Long Road Out of Eden). A lovely declaration of support written for his teenage daughter, Frey’s simple ballad sets a personal declaration to a gently driving beat. The use of martial drumming seems peculiar on first listen, a harsh component for such a warm song, but on repeated spins, the rhythm track makes sense, representing the steady presence of a father saying he’ll always be there during rough times. Frey’s vocal is sincere and soothing, and the keyboard grace notes that accentuate the minimalistic chorus add radiance. One hopes the song remains a comfort to Frey’s family now that he’s gone.

 

59. “I Don’t Want to Hear Any More” (Long Road Out of Eden). Having cowritten “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” Paul Carrack found his way onto yet another Eagles album with this solo composition, performed, naturally, by Schmit. While “I Don’t Want to Hear Any More” is weightier than “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” offering a more nuanced lyric and a stronger beat, it’s very much a soft-rock number, dissecting the moment when a lover realizes he’s about to get kicked to the curb. (Yes, it’s about a dude asking for space to cry privately—not exactly the nerviest sentiment in rock history.) To the song’s credit, the lyrics convey a measure of world-weary wisdom, the driving bassline adds tension, Schmit injects his line readings with delicate feeling, and shimmering guitar contributions by Steuart Smith and Walsh help cast the desired spell. A minor hit with the elevator-music crowd, the song reached No. 23 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

 

58. “Earlybird” (Eagles). The only tune that Leadon and Meisner wrote together, “Earlybird” is about one-half of a great number. Beginning a bit too literally with a recording of bird chirps, the song segues into a sweet groove thanks to the juxtaposition of a swirling banjo pattern with a steady rock beat. Leadon’s lead vocal is as unmemorable as the lyric, but when he plugs in his electric guitar to play lead parts, the song takes off, with quick little jabs offsetting the pretty blend of Leadon’s and Meisner’s voices during sustained syllables. The song begs, however, for a lyrical polish from Henley and a minute or so of extended musical development from Frey, perhaps a next-level bridge or a storm-the-castle vamp. As is, “Earlybird” is a tasty appetizer.

 

57. “No More Walks in the Wood” (Long Road Out of Eden). Certain Long Road songs are such close avatars for previous Eagles triumphs that it’s as if the band made a list of past successes to emulate. This opening track, for instance, is a group-harmony vocal piece set to gentle guitar strumming, much in the vein of “Seven Bridges Road” but dour instead of romantic. Henley and Smith did a fine job setting a poem by John Hollander to music, and the song’s cautionary message taps into Henley’s familiar environmentalist themes. Yet even though “No More Walks in the Wood” is undeniably beautiful, the track exudes the portentousness that once led Mojo Nixon to label Henley a “long-haired poet of despair.”

 

56. “Seven Bridges Road” (Eagles Live). A high-spirited cover of a lyrical ballad by Steve Young, “Seven Bridges Road” was the only “new” song on Eagles Live, and it’s a handsome showcase for the band’s legendary harmonies, especially during the a cappella passages. To the occasional accompaniment of insistently plucked acoustic guitar, Felder, Frey, Henley, Schmit, and Walsh dive and soar in perfect unison. The stripped-down arrangement lets listeners enjoy the way Frey’s warm tenor, Henley’s high rasp, Schmit’s choir-boy purity, and Walsh’s nasal whine complement each other. (Felder’s colorless voice gets lost in the mix, though he contributes the guitar parts.) A minor entry in the canon, to be sure, but still a highly enjoyable one.

 

55. “Center of the Universe” (Long Road Out of Eden). Arguably the most derivative tune in the Henley-Frey songbook—that is, if one sets aside numbers that prompted accusations of plagiarism—“Center of the Universe” sounds like a deliberate homage to the Beatles, especially given how the romantic guitar solo echoes George Harrison’s playing and how the breathy “ahh” coming out of the chorus recalls the sighing vocals of “Because.” Yet while the sound is Fab Four, the lyrics are pure Eagles. (Frey and Henley share songwriting credit with Smith.) If it’s possible to imagine such a thing, “Center of the Universe” is a condescending love song, with an obnoxious protagonist explaining that the unimportance of a romance, relative to the scope of creation, is satisfactory. “I hate to disappoint you,” the fellow coos patronizingly, “but there’s something you should know.” A declaration of commitment in the form of an existential smackdown—that’s about as Henley as it gets. It’s tempting to believe the song’s softer textures reflect Frey deliberately undercutting his partner’s superciliousness.

 

54. “Out of Control” (Desperado). The title of this tune, one of the band’s best early rockers, would seem to connote something well outside the Eagles’ purview, as their laboriously crafted music often makes the group seem irredeemably uptight. However, as many examples throughout this list prove, they could cut loose, in their fashion, when the moment was right. Witness the authenticity pulsing through this aggressive track, written by Frey, Henley, and Tom Nixon. Motor City machismo infusing his you-want-a-piece-of-this guitar work and vocals, Frey rides the fast tempo like a buckaroo on a bronc, and when he hits the key lyric paralleling Old West wilding with rock-and-roll striving (“You got to gamble on your story—you got no guts, you get no glory”), he advances the eager-young-guns theme that Meisner introduced with the debut LP’s “Tryin’.”

 

53. “My Man” (On the Border). By the band’s third album, Leadon’s mellow and/or bluegrassy and/or psychedelic discursions seemed to exist a world apart from the mainstream songcraft of the Henley-Frey brain trust. In some ways, this gentle ode to the recently deceased Gram Parsons brought Leadon back into the fold, since it’s a melodic, plaintive number in the style of the band’s first platter, only with slicker harmonies and production. “My Man” is a lovely tune with thoughtful lyrics, and the theme of surviving loss fits into the Eagles’ collective identity more comfortably than some of Leadon’s other walkabouts. Moreover, Leadon clearly strove to capture something about Parsons’s idiosyncrasy, even though the initial inspiration for the song was another gone-too-soon musician, Duane Allman.

 

52. “Please Come Home for Christmas” (single-only release, 1978). Boy, was there a lesson here the band failed to learn. Cut to placate their impatient label, this slick cover of Charles Brown’s vintage yuletide number breezed into the Top 20. (Henley knew the original recording from a soul-music station he listened to as a young man in Texas.) Jaunty and melodic, the cut showcases Henley’s R&B vocals at their finest, while Felder’s crisp solo suits the pristine arrangement. As to the lesson the song could have taught the Eagles, it’s about not worrying everything to death. Unfortunately, Henley and Frey were so far down the delusions-of-grandeur rabbit hole that they wrote or cowrote nine of the ten tracks on The Long Run, even though they didn’t have nine songs’ worth of great material. In a different world, someone could have persuaded the Eagles to record a few cover tunes, get the LP finished a year before they actually did, and move forward with their fraternal bonds intact. As for “Please Come Home for Christmas,” it remains one of the band’s most durable singles, getting heavy rotation every holiday season.

 

51. “Hole in the World” (single-only release, 2003). The new tunes on Hell Freezes Over didn’t reveal much about where the band might head creatively if the members ever got serious about recording again. “Hole in the World” provided a better clue. Inspired by the 9/11 attacks but arriving two years after the fact, the tune foreshadows songwriting flaws that plague Long Road. Featuring a gospel-tinged Henley vocal and succinct lyrics about the futility of religious strife, the song gets off to a good start with a claps-and-clicks rhythm track and splendid harmonies, imaginatively using a chorus-verse structure instead of a verse-chorus structure. Unfortunately, after another solid chorus-verse sequence, the song gets stuck on repeat, with six iterations of the chorus comprising the remainder of the composition. Henley sculpts some sweet Al Green–style riffs around the group vocals, and the song becomes a round for a while, but the lack of a bridge or a third verse makes the tune feel unfinished, even though the arrangement, playing, and production are flawless. Similar criticisms can be leveled at lots of material on Long Road, throughout which it seems as if more attention was given to finessing production than to refining compositions.

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.