(Credits: Far Out / Showtime / The Eagles)
Wed 18 February 2026 20:32, UK
The evolution of the Eagles saw the band find their identity in real time. Four country rock musicians who were adept singers, the original lineup of the Eagles featured more-or-less equal divisions in songwriting. Along with friends like Jackson Browne and Jack Tempchin, the band worked up different songs in bits and pieces, with Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner often working on their own to get songs together.
By 1975’s One of These Nights, things had changed dramatically. Most obvious was the addition of third guitarist Don Felder, whose stinging lead lines added a new rock element to the band’s sound. But by the mid-1970s, Frey and Hanley had established themselves as the primary songwriters of the Eagles. While other band members would often add instrumental ideas, it was Frey and Henley who focused on lyrics, composition, and arrangements.
That ability to write songs together had to come together over the course of a few albums, but by One of These Nights, Frey believed that he and Henley had it down. “I’d go over to the piano and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’” Frey told Tavis Smiley in 2012. “I’d play something, and he’d go, ‘Yeah, I like that, I like that.’ Maybe just get up and start singing. That’s the way we wrote ‘One of These Nights.’ I just went over to the piano and I started playing this little minor descending progression, and he comes over and goes, (singing) ‘One of these nights.’ I go, yeah, yeah.”
“We had Don Henley’s voice, which allowed us to go in a more soulful direction, which made me exceedingly happy,” Frey wrote in the liner notes to the 2003 compilation album The Very Best Of. “A lot of things came together on One Of These Nights – our love of the studio, the dramatic improvement in Don’s and my songwriting. We made a quantum leap with ‘One Of These Nights’. It was a breakthrough song. It is my favourite Eagles record. If I ever had to pick one, it wouldn’t be ‘Hotel California’; it wouldn’t be ‘Take It Easy’. For me, it would be ‘One Of These Nights’.”
With a mix of hard rock lead guitar from Felder and disco rhythms from Henley, ‘One of These Nights’ was lightyears away from the delicate country rock that the Eagles had originally pioneered in the early 1970s. But it was much closer to the mainstream, with ‘One of These Nights’ becoming the band’s second consecutive number-one single after ‘Best of My Love’. That stylistic shift was a conscious move on Henley’s part.
“We like to be a nice little country-rock band from Los Angeles … about half the time,” Henley told Rolling Stone in 1975. “We wanted to get away from the ballad syndrome with ‘One of These Nights’. With Don Felder in the band now, we can really rock.”
What made ‘One of These Nights’ so pivotal was not simply its chart success, but the confidence it signalled. The Eagles were no longer tentative songwriters trading verses in a Laurel Canyon living room. They had discovered a formula that balanced groove with melody, polish with edge. The track announced that they were willing to evolve beyond their country rock roots without abandoning the vocal harmonies that defined them.
In hindsight, Frey’s preference for the song over ‘Hotel California’ speaks volumes about the band’s internal journey. ‘One of These Nights’ captures the moment they stepped fully into their ambition, embracing a broader, slicker sound that would dominate the latter half of the decade. It stands as the point where the Eagles stopped searching for an identity and began dictating the direction of mainstream rock.
Check out ‘One of These Nights’ down below.