(Credits: Far Out / Steve Alexander)
Thu 29 January 2026 17:27, UK
If you are a true lover of music, then there is a good chance that you have tried to introduce your friends to a favourite band of yours that they have never given enough time to listen to. It doesn’t matter if they’re beloved like The Beatles or wildly successful like the Eagles, that first song is a pivotal moment.
That first song needs to be perfectly balanced. It needs to welcome the new listener without overwhelming them. It needs to provide a jumping-off point from which to truly dive into the band; there’s no point swallowing up your listener with an underrated gem. You need the perfect song.
No song can officially be considered perfect by the time someone is finished writing it. Every song is practically a work in progress once it comes into the studio, and even when Bob Dylan recorded some of his greatest tunes, he was constantly switching up the lyrics and adding subtle inflexions to the melody whenever he played some of his classics in a live setting. But Glenn Frey always knew that the best songs weren’t ones that did everything right; it was those that had absolutely nothing wrong with them.
Then again, it’s not like Eagles didn’t have a fair bit of moments in their catalogue that didn’t work that well. Throughout their first few records, it was clear that they were testing out the bugs of their sound most of the time, and even if there were some great moments like ‘Desperado’, there were also tunes like ‘Take the Devil’ or ‘Tryin’ that felt like any other lesser country act’s feeble attempt at make some rock and roll.
But Frey was also determined to make something that would put them in the big leagues with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and that wasn’t going to happen by playing with Linda Ronstadt for the rest of his life. There had to be some sort of song to help send them over the edge, and while Don Henley hadn’t started collaborating with him on songs just yet, he did have a few confidantes in people like JD Souther and Jackson Browne.
Eagles and their wagon wheels. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Browne had already accidentally taught Frey how to write songs by living underneath him and pounding away at tunes until they were finished, but Frey knew that he could always find that one magical turn of phrase to help tie a tune together. And when Browne had a track put together about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, Frey bringing in a line about a girl in a flatbed Ford was what made ‘Take It Easy’ sound so breezy.
Because, really, ‘Take It Easy’ encapsulates everything Frey and his band were about in only three minutes. There’s still that callback to country music with Bernie Leadon’s countrified guitar licks, but hearing them kick into high gear in the choruses feels like putting the top down on a convertible in the middle of summer and driving through the desert with no real destination in mind.
Even when looking back on his storied career, Frey thought ‘Take It Easy’ was tailor-made for the country rockers, saying, “Right underneath us in an even smaller studio apartment was Jackson. He had his piano and guitars down there. That’s when I first heard ‘Take It Easy.’ I don’t know that we could have ever had a better opening song on our first album. Just those open chords felt like an announcement, ‘And now … the Eagles.’”
But that was only the start of what Frey’s career had in store. Even though ‘Take It Easy’ would remain a staple of their career and be played at almost every subsequent show for the rest of time, a lot of the beauty behind it is how pure it sounds next to every other track they put in their setlist.
Songs like ‘Hotel California’ or ‘New Kid In Town’ might get more applause whenever they’re played live, but something about ‘Take It Easy’ says more about the band than even Frey could have imagined. The rest of the world had been thinking about the horrors of the Summer of Love coming to an end, but here came the long-haired California rockers, reminding us that everyone was going to be OK.
If you needed one song to bring the brilliance of the Eagles to the fore, to give your listener a perfect dose of what they could, and did, do, then you’d best start off at the very beginning. As Mary Poppins once proclaimed, that is a very good place to start.
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