(Credits: Far Out / Asylum Records)
Fri 27 March 2026 20:00, UK
The entire story of the Eagles has always been about the ‘American Dream’ in many respects.
Don Henley was determined to work his hardest to become one of the biggest bands in the world, and when looking at the mark that they have left on society, it’s safe to say that people will still be singing ‘Take It Easy’ and air-guitaring to ‘Hotel California’ until the end of time. But even though they had a fond fascination with American culture, they were also more than happy to throw a few jabs when they saw their country moving in the wrong direction.
Then again, you don’t really need someone like me to tell you that Henley likes to speak his mind. He was an English major all throughout college, and it’s not like he wasn’t going to put that to good use in his lyrics. He wanted to leave the audience with something that they could remember when their songs faded out, and almost every single album had at least one tune that touched on something deeper than the average ode to fun in the sun and the simple pleasures in life.
‘The Last Resort’ was a bold look at how we treat our planet, and even when the band was completely out of ideas around the time of The Long Run, ‘The Sad Cafe’ was one final ode to the days when they didn’t have a care in the world. But when Henley and Glenn Frey started putting the band back together, they needed to take a look at what was happening around them as well. Hell Freezes Over was a good start, but once 9/11 rocked the entire world, the air seemed to taste a lot different when they went into the studio.
The band had already been scheduled to work on September 11th, 2001, but even after making the single ‘Hole in the World’ about the tragedy, Henley wasn’t yet done. He felt that they needed to turn their voices up now that America was heading off to war. That’s what their heroes did back in the late 1960s when Vietnam was on fire, but ‘Long Road Out of Eden’ was something much more all-encompassing than looking at a bunch of soldiers heading off to fight for their country.
Running at over ten minutes, the song feels like an odyssey through the different pieces of the American Dream that are losing their value over time. Most people didn’t have time to worry about the hard work they were putting into their passion now that they lived in the age of instant gratification, and Henley was holding up a mirror to how much that dream had fallen in recent years.
And when Frey talked about making the song, the whole thing came together almost as a stream of consciousness among the band members, saying, “I’m sitting at the piano. Timothy [B Schmit] goes over and picks up an acoustic guitar and we all start putting together this story called ‘Long Road Out of Eden’, which is really about the war in Iraq. It was like another ‘Last Resort’ on that album.”
It might be the centrepiece of the band’s final record, but Henley didn’t skimp out on getting a lot more biting on the rest of the album. There are still the carefree tunes every now and again like Joe Walsh’s ‘Last Good Time in Town’, but Henley held nothing back on a song like ‘Frail Grasp on the Big Picture’, especially in the final section where he talks about praying to a God that he knows is American and presides over football games.
So, really, a lot of what ‘Long Road Out of Eden’ was doing was encapsulating everything that had led rock and roll to this point in time. Eagles had been known for years as the kind of band to chill out to and practically turn off your brain when listening to, but after decades in the industry, they had seen what the world around them had come to and weren’t liking what they saw.
