(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Warner Bros)
Sat 13 December 2025 16:00, UK
Given how their legacy puts them towards the top of the pile of the greatest rock bands of all time, it’s hard to think that any of the albums released by the Eagles ever struggled to connect with their audience.
While their biggest records such as Hotel California and On The Border received near-unanimous praise upon release, some of them were slightly underwhelming in terms of their critical and commercial reception at the time they were put into the world, but despite that, they’ve managed to get reevaluated over time.
Upon reflection, there isn’t exactly a weak release in the band’s catalogue, and the fact that they managed to stick to overarching themes over the course of most of their albums is something that the band should be able to look back on with a sense of pride and accomplishment. However, in spite of this, there are certain elements of their back catalogue that the group do wish they’d approached in a different way.
If they were to revisit their releases, as Don Henley did during a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, and highlight both the positive and negative aspects of all of them, it would be a surprise to hear them be critical of these widely adored records. Yet, ever the critic, Henley himself had a few choice words to say about the directions that were taken on some of their classic albums.
After expressing that their self-titled debut didn’t accomplish the band’s goals of writing albums that didn’t have any filler on them, and later bemoaning the fact that achieving their first number one hit with ‘Best of My Love’ was “both good and bad” for the band, he would attempt to give his brutally honest take on Desperado, and why he felt the album fell flat for multiple reasons.
The band had initially thought that it would be their breakout success, with it being a far tighter and more conceptual release than their debut, but despite all of the painstaking effort that went into making it, Henley doesn’t necessarily agree that they managed to succeed in their mission, hence why it didn’t manage to live up to expectations.
When asked about the connection between the outlaws from the 19th century and the rock acts of the 20th century that the themes of Desperado were supposedly based around, he responded by arguing that his bandmate, Glenn Frey, had seemingly overcooked the premise.
“Glenn always said that there were a number of connections, although in retrospect, I think that some of them were tenuous at best,” Henley disputed. “The basic premise was that, like the outlaws, rock & roll bands lived outside the ‘laws of normality’, we were not part of ‘conventional society’. We all went from town to town, collecting money and women, the critical difference being that we didn’t rob or kill anybody for what we got; we worked for it.”
Even though Henley feels that the concept didn’t click with the audience and that they were trying too hard to tie in a theme that was barely recognisable in the end result, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the songwriting is still stellar across the board on Desperado, and while it may not be everyone’s favourite album of theirs, it marks a dramatic step towards the perfection they’d later manage to achieve.
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