(Credits: Far Out / Greenwich Entertainment)
Tue 28 October 2025 13:15, UK
No song can claim to be perfect from back to front. Even if every instrument is played to the best of the artist’s ability, there will always be those subtle imperfections that muddy up the mix, bringing an added sense of character that no one else can replicate. While the Eagles still had to work out the bugs of their sound throughout their career, Glenn Frey felt that one track represented one of the first peaks of their songwriting.
When the band first got together, though, much of their debut album was assembled piecemeal from different artists. After Frey started the group with Don Henley on the back of Linda Ronstadt’s outfit, much of their debut included a laundry list of songs they worked on in initial jam sessions, like the hard-rocking ‘Witchy Woman’.
By the time the band needed their first hits, they made the most out of their friends’ material. Recording old favourites like their cover of the song ‘Nightingale’, one of their more recognisable hits from their early years, came courtesy of Jack Tempchin, who brought in the mellow groove of ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’.
When the band started to work on a song with Jackson Browne entitled ‘Take It Easy’, Frey’s magic appeared for the first time. Stuck in the second verse, Browne eventually handed the track over to the rest of the group when Frey filled in the blanks, singing about a beautiful woman slowing down to take a look at him from the back of her flatbed Ford.
Even though the album performed decently on the charts, the band were just as nervous about what becoming stars entailed. After wondering whether they could write anything worthwhile, Frey presented Henley with an idea that he had been working on based on Roy Orbison’s music.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Featuring a Spanish-flavoured rhythm guitar part, ‘Tequila Sunrise’ would mark the first time that Frey and Henley collaborated on a tune, creating the musical embodiment of the sun rising after a night of heavy drinking. Even though Frey and Henley would write many other classics since their first collaboration, Frey insisted that ‘Tequila Sunrise’ still holds a special place in his heart.
In the liner notes of The Very Best of the Eagles, Frey thought that the piece was as perfect as they could have written at the time, saying, “I love the song. I think the goal of any songwriter is to make a song appear seamless, to never show the struggle. Nothing should sound forced. ‘Tequila Sunrise’ was written fairly quickly, and I don’t think there’s a single chord out of place.”
The track was, by and large, an effort straight form the mind of Glenn Frey. “I didn’t even know what a flatbed Ford was,” Jackson Browne told Rolling Stone when referring to his lyrics. “You need a guy like Glenn, who’s a ‘girl-Ford-Lord’ guy. Also he put himself into the song: The girl ‘slowing down to take a look at me’ – that’s pure Glenn Frey.”
It’s easy to see what Frey is discussing to make it seamless. For all of the woodshedding that goes into writing a melody as bulletproof as this, their delivery makes the whole song sound like they were just in the right place at the right time when the engineer decided to push the record button on the console.
Even though the accompanying Desperado album didn’t have the same massive response Frey and Henley had thought, it didn’t seem to matter. The songwriting duo behind the Eagles had congealed, and it was time for them to start soundtracking the California dream.
Don Henley thinks he understood exactly why the song was so popular: “The song’s primary appeal, I think, is that it evokes a sense of motion, both musically and lyrically. The romance of the open road. The lure of adventure and possibility – Route 66, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Pacific Coast Highway. Great American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Jack Kerouac to Wallace Stegner have addressed this theme of the restlessness of the American spirit, of our need to keep moving, especially from east to west, in search of freedom, identity, fortune and this elusive thing we call ‘home.’”
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