(Credits: Far Out / Greenwich Entertainment)
Thu 4 December 2025 14:00, UK
Getting the Eagles to become one of the most pristine rock and roll bands of all time didn’t happen by accident.
From the first record onward, Glenn Frey and Don Henley wanted to build the best band they had ever seen, and whenever they stepped onstage to sing their harmonies, there was never any doubt that they could create some of the greatest music that any American band ever spat out. But as far as Frey was concerned, the measure of a good band came down to the songs they had at their disposal.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people try to get into the business for fashion rather than anything else. Everyone can have the right connections, studio time to spare, and the most in-demand producers that money can buy, but if they don’t have a tune at the end of the day, all of them are going to end up falling away just like all the other flashes in the pan that come and go on the charts.
And if there’s one thing that Frey wanted to make absolutely clear, it was that the Eagles were there to stay. He already had a lyrical mastermind in Henley, and Frey was certainly no slouch when coming up with a great line for a song, but he also knew how each chord should work off of the vocal. Sometimes it would get down to the point of dissecting individual words, but as long as they had a song with no flaws, all the legwork that it took to get there didn’t even matter half the time.
There’s a lot of pride that comes with creating something that’s timeless, but Frey was also more than happy to sing along to songs that were knockouts by someone else. There are plenty of covers scattered throughout the Eagles’ first albums, like Jackson Browne’s ‘Nightingale’ or David Blue’s ‘Outlaw Man’ on Desperado, but after years of playing rock and roll, the idea of toning things down was much more in line with Frey’s voice at the time.
He had sprinkled in bits of soul music into his solo career ever since the Eagles broke up, but when he got back into the studio for the album After Hours, he made sure every single tune was an absolute classic, saying, “Sometimes an album just develops a life of its own. In that case, I didn’t want it to be all songs from the Forties. I wanted it to be a record for piano. That’s the thing about every song in this record. Nothing is out of place.”
While you’re not going to find too many Frey originals on the album, it’s pretty safe to pull from some of the greatest songsmiths of years gone by. Frey wasn’t the first person to jump on the standards bandwagon or anything, but hearing his renditions of tunes like ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ and ‘For Sentimental Reasons’ only serves to remind us of how perfect those songs were to begin with.
And given his history as one of the leading figures of California rock and roll, it’s nice to see that Frey put Brian Wilson’s ‘Caroline No’ in equal company with the classics. It may have been a bit more recent compared to all of the other tunes from days gone by, but it’s safe to say that Wilson’s masterpiece has held up as a classic on par with anything that his heroes were putting out.
Frey could have easily kept making his own solo records, but the idea of him slowing down and making a record like this was exactly what he needed at the time. After Hours isn’t really the first record that most people should be listening to in order to understand him, but looking at the track listing, the Eagles’ comeback album wished it had as many well-written songs as what turned up here.
Related Topics