(Credit: TaurusEmerald)
Sun 28 December 2025 18:00, UK
Like many who emerged in the same pool of rock legends, Don Felder first wanted to be a musician when he saw Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.
From there, Felder did what just about any aspiring teen musician would do, and taught himself how to play the guitar before forming his own band. Because he didn’t have the luxury of financial support for his new hobby, a lot of what he did back then was do what felt natural and surround himself with like-minded people, who just so happened to be people like Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon.
Before he’d even become a major name, therefore, Felder was a young leader. Maybe that’s part of the reason why, although he wasn’t one of the founding members of the Eagles, his contributions are often as celebrated as though he were. As with almost all successful rock groups, though, frayed dynamics become inevitable when two or more members start to take more control, leaving the others feeling like second best when it comes to the decisions they make.
Felder has never been shy about his post-Eagles grievances, and even detailed many of the reasons his feelings towards other members, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, turned sour in his 2008 memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles. Even still, after his boot in 2001 left him reeling, he eventually softened again, even going as far as to compare his former musical partners to the songwriting alliance between Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
It makes sense as to why these struggles would come up to begin with, though. After all, things were bound to get a little hairy when there’s an unequal distribution of credit and control, and Felder did have many good ideas to push around beyond his parts on ‘Hotel California’. From a young age, Felder was constantly thinking of new ways to work smarter, which was a mindset he brought to the Eagles.
One piece of advice he brought to the table was from Leadon, which he thought would give his ideas more weight when passing them through Henley and Frey. When trying to come up with his own songs, Leadon had previously told him to ditch the focus on a lyric or melody, and instead try to come up with something with a firm structure.
’’If you want to write songs for the Eagles, don’t write lyrics, don’t write melodies, just write music beds in a song structure – the intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus – just a framework,” Leadon had told him. This might have worked in the right circumstances, but Felder’s first go at it didn’t exactly end up with the band-defining hit he’d probably hoped for, with his first submission – ‘Move On’ – being repeatedly pushed off record tracklisting and ushered into the darkness until finally emerging in the last few years.
Recalling the moment he took the song to the rest of the band, Felder told American Songwriter, “I mixed that down onto a little cassette and gave a copy of it to Don Henley, just like Bernie suggested. He [Henley] said, ‘I really like that. We should write a song called ‘Slide On,’ and I went, ‘That just sounds a little corny to me.’ We were getting ready to go on the road when I submitted it, so if anything, it was going to wind up on the next record, One of These Nights, which by that time, we had already written a lot of other stuff for.”
Felder eventually went back to basics after realising he was perhaps taking the “backwards” approach. Mainly, this meant coming up with a killer chorus and working around that, and realising that coming up with a good idea almost always starts with the lyrics and the melody, not the other way around.
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