(Credit: Alamy)

Mon 8 September 2025 18:00, UK

Eagles were never satisfied with being a merely good California rock band.

Don Henley had a vision far beyond the Los Angeles scene, and when they first began their journey with ‘Take it Easy’, the rest of the country discovered the soundtrack to their lives half the time they came on the radio. But while each album was there to build momentum, Henley knew there would always be moments that stood out better for him.

But looking at the beginning of their career, a lot of their first albums felt like they were trying to run before they could walk. Desperado is an ingenious idea for a country-rock band to take on, but an entire record detailing the lives of outlaws with countrified music playing in the background is a lot more hit-and-miss than what they were setting out to do. They needed a better concept, but they would need a little more time to flesh that out.

Since the public didn’t like Desperado that much, records like On the Border and One of These Nights were more focused on bringing in the massive singles. They didn’t have the same sense of scope and spectacle as tracks like ‘Tequila Sunrise’ or ‘Doolin Dalton’, but it was better to have a bunch of people singing along to ‘Already Gone’ and ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ than have to worry about the storyline going on in a record.

After they cut that fat from their records and drafted in Joe Walsh, Hotel California became the best of both worlds. You could look at it like a concept album if you wanted to, but the majority of the album was about making sure every song worked well, from the Twilight Zone madness on the title track to the cocaine-fuelled energy of ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ to bringing everything back down to Earth on ‘The Last Resort’.

They all knew they had made a masterpiece, but it takes more than a few classic songs to get an album to the top of the hit parade. The entire band had cut their teeth making the record, but right when their greatest hits album started rocketing up the charts, what became a mandatory release for their label ended up turning into one of the biggest happy accidents that they could have asked for.

Henley was never on board with releasing a greatest hits record, but after building that momentum, he realised that they had the potential a musical empire with their next record, saying, “We didn’t really want that album to be released, but had allowed the label to do it in order to buy ourselves more time to work on the Hotel California album. So, when the Greatest Hits album exploded on the charts, that really kicked the momentum into high gear. By the time Hotel California was released, the circumstances couldn’t have been better; the world was ready and waiting.”

Which probably helps when the next record plays like a greatest hits record that happened to be released as a studio album. Nearly everything on the record had the potential to be a single, and even if not everything had the same kind of action on the charts, there’s a reason why a third of the tracks on the record are still staples of the band’s live set all the way to their reunion tours.

Eagles were never out there to be the coolest band in the world by any stretch, but the rollout for Hotel California is proof of the biggest rule in the music industry. You can be ridiculed for not fitting in or only be seen as soft by the rock and roll purists, but if you have the right songs, no one can touch you.

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