(Credits: Far Out / Essential Broadcast Media / Showtime)
Fri 26 December 2025 18:26, UK
In 2017, tenor vocalist Vince Gill joined none other than the Eagles on stage for the first time in his life, and it was sadly a tragedy that brought him there, as he was filling in for the late Glenn Frey.
He joined Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B Schmit, and Glenn’s son, Deacon Frey, onstage to honour Frey’s legacy, and the show went so well that Gill would soon become a full-time touring member of the band.
For Gill, this was a huge honour as the man had shared, countless times, that he felt that the music of the Eagles was essentially part of his DNA. Somewhere in the gloomy shadows of an attic, Gill has tapes of him singing classic Eagles songs at the age of 14, so the new job was a dream come true, though the musician didn’t want to be just a hollow replacement of an incredible man, as a bandage slapped over a gaping wound.
Gill was thus brought into the fold with disquieting voices in his head but an appetite for success and a familiarity with the Eagles’ catalogue that could rival that of a superfan. As an outsider now at the beating heart of the group, he had to put his preferences and relationship with the music to the side and become part of their collective consciousness.
The fact of the matter, though, is that he did have favourites, and he even shared them with Rolling Stone after his first foray onto the Eagles stage. One of his all-time picks was ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, a song he deemed “so country” thanks to that twangalicious atmosphere; another was the classic ‘Desperado’, a tune which Gill made an astute observation about: “Don [Henley’s] voice is so distinctive; it’s not unlike hearing Ray Charles”.
That ability to handle distinct tones came in very handy when the Eagles chose to cover other artists when either out on the road or in the studio. Standing as Gill’s “sentimental favourite” on this front was none other than the 1974 tune, ‘Ol’ 55′, originally written by the quirky, croaking crooner, Tom Waits.
The Eagles released the track on their 1974 album On the Border, a year after Waits originally released the tune, which became notable for its use of the pedal steel, helping evoke the affectations of the open road, punctuated only by the blooming of shrubbery and the shadows of whinnying horses on a horizon line as promising as it is unknown.
For this reason, it resides among Gill’s all-time favourite Eagles songs, period. But Waits certainly didn’t share that view. The slouch-hatted singer famously quipped, “I frankly was not that particularly crazy about their rendition of it.”
Explaining to WAMU, “The song is about five years old, it’s one of the first songs I wrote, so I felt like it was kind of flattering that somebody wanted to do your song, but at the same time I thought their version was a little antiseptic.” But Gill would retort that it was simply a clinically clean slice of soul-stirring perfection, instead.
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