(Credits: Alamy)
Fri 20 February 2026 0:00, UK
The biggest Eagles songs feel like they are more like a part of American folklore than actual hits at this point.
Many of us haven’t had the pleasure of knowing what the warm smell of colitas actually smells like, but just reading that probably puts you in the mindset of driving down a dark desert highway and seeing a slightly foreboding hotel in the middle of California. Even if not everything they talked about was real, they were all brilliant pictures in your mind, and Glenn Frey was already well ahead of the game when he first started making tunes with the Eagles.
But for a brief second, it looked like Frey was never going to be a superstar at all. He had all the wit that you would expect of a rock and roll frontman, but since his duo Longbranch/Pennywhistle had pretty much disintegrated, there was no reason to believe that he was going to be the next Mick Jagger or anything. Then again, most people didn’t have Don Henley as a creative partner, either.
Frey and Henley were joined at the hip musically, and when they started to hit it off, they needed to get out of Linda Ronstadt’s band and move on to something different. There was only one problem: neither of them had ever written a song together before. They each had great songs on their own, but there was no real ‘wow’ factor happening when they put out that first Eagles project.
Which probably explains why they pulled a page out of the Ringo Starr playbook and got a little help from their friends. ‘Nightingale’ was a song on the country rock circuit that every band played, and since Jack Tempchin contributed ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, they already had that rootsy rock aesthetic down to a science. But if there was one person who would help them hit a home run, it was Jackson Browne.
Browne was known for writing the most beautiful love songs of all time, but ‘Take It Easy’ was something different. This was a song that you sang and let the breeze blow through your hair, but Browne had painted himself into a corner when writing the line about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. While I’m sure there are a lot of fine people in Winslow, it wasn’t exactly the most high-profile city in the world, but it did give Frey fodder to finish off one of the band’s first songs.
The tune had already been about Browne being on the run from a bunch of women that had their hearts broken, but Frey was the one adding in the second verse, saying, “[Jackson] had ‘I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.’ So I filled in ‘Such a fine sight to see. It’s a girl, My Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at me.’” And for someone who had only written a few fairweather hits in California, that was one of the most effortlessly perfect lines he could have written.
The lion’s share of all great rock songs needs to have that one line that seals the deal, and even though the concept of a guy looking for a girl isn’t anything new, those few lines created an image that was unmistakably Eagles. They would write plenty of songs about the American Dream, and listening to them talk about a girl who’s slowly working her way over to him is the kind of romantic line that most songwriters could spend years trying to write perfectly.
Henley might have been the more thoughtful member of the Eagles whenever he sang their songs, but there’s something about ‘Take It Easy’ that encapsulates everything that they were about. They could get a lot more serious when they wanted to, but there was no shame in writing a song that was all about driving down a highway without a single care in the world.