(Credits: Far Out / Steve Alexander)
Sat 20 December 2025 19:30, UK
By the time the Eagles started, Glenn Frey knew that his band needed to be even better than the best.
No one got to the top of the mountain by being merely good, and if he wanted to go down in history with some of his favourite artists, he needed to prove to be more than a flash in the pan. But like all great songwriters, he felt that the true artists were the ones who kept practising their craft one song at a time until they became the legends that they had always dreamed of being.
After all, Frey already had a firsthand education about the importance of songwriting through Jackson Browne. He would woodshed all day and night until he had a song that he was proud of, and with Don Henley writing with Frey, he knew that they had to keep working at tunes until they found something they were happy with. Sometimes it worked, but they did need a bit more elbow grease in the early days.
‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ were fantastic tunes on their debut record, but Desperado was the sound of them trying to run before they could walk. The conceptual masterpiece needed a few more years to really come to fruition, but in the meantime, Frey was going to use everything he could to try and find ways to twist those chords until he found what he was looking for.
But even by most rock and roll standards, nobody was going to even think about working as Joni Mitchell did. Frey had already been following in the footsteps of bands like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but even they couldn’t fathom to understand what Mitchell was doing half the time, complete with her strange tunings and her ability to work with everyone from folk singers to the greatest names in jazz.
Working with anyone of that calibre would have been daunting, but Frey felt that Mitchell was the gold standard that Eagles should always aspire to be, saying during their peak, “I want to stay sharp as long as I can. Christ knows Joni Mitchell has been an inspiration. It can be done. You can go further. You don’t have to fizzle out at 27.” And as they continued on, the rest of the world was willing to listen long after they reached their 30s.
Because for Mitchell, the goal of any songwriter was the strength of the songs rather than the trends. Hejira may have been made long after she had written tunes like ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, but you can hear all of those years in the music industry in her voice and how she has taken all of that time to make more nuanced takes on life rather than the typical love songs.
The same could be said of what the Eagles were doing years after the fact. The Long Run may have been their one moment where everything grinded to a halt, but even in their respective solo careers, Frey was proving that he could still have fun making ‘The Heat is On’ while Henley got even more acclaim for his brilliant commentaries on the human condition on ‘The Boys of Summer’ and ‘The End of the Innocence’.
So while Mick Jagger might have felt that there was a time limit on certain rock stars, the Eagles have proved that immortality can be achieved with the right tunes. Because no matter how many times other acts may strut their way across the stage, what matters is whether or not people will still be singing along to their favourite bands long after they’ve left the stage for the final time.
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