(Credits: TIDAL)
Wed 4 February 2026 0:00, UK
Anyone thinking about joining the Eagles needed to know what they were getting into with Don Henley.
The chance to sing all of those fantastic tunes every night was bound to be a challenge for anyone, but from the moment that he started the band alongside Glenn Frey, Henley wanted to make sure that everything was absolutely perfect before they even walked into the studio. Perfection wasn’t necessarily the goal every single time they played, but if they wanted to be good, they needed to surround themselves with people who could get the job done whenever they hit the stage.
This is probably why the band went through a few different incarnations throughout their career. There might not have been anything inherently wrong with Randy Meisner or Bernie Leadon when they decided to leave the band, but since the music was evolving, it was better to have Joe Walsh playing off of Don Felder than worrying about throwing in a country-style lead to any of their songs anymore.
They had grown out of their country-rock roots, but that sound never truly goes away, either. Their generation was packed with the best singer-songwriters in the world, and even if they had some kickass riffs in their arsenal, there was no way that they could make a song that couldn’t work just as well if it were played solo on a piano or break someone’s heart when strumming away on a guitar.
Then again, the same could be said about the country movement that came out shortly after the Eagles broke up. The classic rock format may have gone into rotation around the same time that the band had their infamous fight in the early 1980s, but if you look at what happened only one decade later, the country audience was making waves with the same style that Henley and Frey had pioneered back in the day.
To this day, there are still people like Brad Paisley in the country sphere who consider Eagles one of their greatest influences, so it made sense that Henley went back to Nashville when looking for someone to stand in for Frey on their later tours. No one would ever properly take his place, but Vince Gill was one of the few voices in classic country that would have been able to fill his shoes without stepping on anyone’s toes.
From day one, Gill knew that he had a job to do whenever he got up onstage, and even though he tried to downplay everything he did, Henley was more than happy to shout his praises for him whenever he was introducing the band, even saying from the stage, “We have been fortunate these past few years to have one of America’s finest singer-songwriters, and he can play that guitar.” But that last compliment may be one of the biggest understatements in the world.
Gill would never take the chance to grandstand any time he’s playing ‘Hotel California’ or ‘Desperado’, but if you look at his track record in his solo career, he’s clearly holding back to some degree. If you were to put a Telecaster in the guy’s hands, he could easily hang with the best rock and roll players of all time, but he always felt that the people were never paying good money to see him make a fool of himself tearing through rock and roll licks.
It was about doing justice to the songs that Henley and Frey wrote back in the day, and even if not every tune has the same magic they did when Frey was singing them, Gill is one of the few people that could make filling those shoes look easy. It wasn’t a cakewalk by any stretch, but he was going to put in the work that he needed to to make sure that everyone left the venue with a smile on their face.
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