The Eagles knew how to pick an opening song. Six of their eight albums began with a hit single, including two consecutive chart-topping songs on 1975’s One of These Nights and then 1976’s Hotel California.
They began 1979’s The Long Run with a Top 10 single and 1972’s Eagles with one that almost reached the Top 10. Both 1974’s On the Border and 1994’s Hell Freezes Over featured Top 40 hits as their first tracks.
This band was the model of sales consistency: Even the two Eagles albums that didn’t kick off with a smash song, 1973’s Desperado and 2007’s Long Road Out of Eden, went multi-platinum. That million-plus-selling streak began with Desperado and continued through seven more albums, including 1980’s Eagles Live.
READ MORE: Ranking Every Eagles Solo Album
Glenn Frey, who co-wrote six of these eight songs, earned unlikely recognition for his knack for composing – and not just from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He helped lead a songwriting class in the 2010s at New York University’s Steinhardt Department of Music. The self-taught Frey never took this kind of college course. Instead, he told the students, “We just said, ‘I wonder if they’d like this?'”
Millions and millions of listeners did – first on radios and stereos and then in sold-out concert venues from coast to coast and around the world.
Don Henley, also credited with six co-writing credits from the following list, continued to lead the Eagles on a series of celebrated tours after Frey’s sudden death in 2016. No new albums followed in Frey’s absence and others took over singing his songs. But three of these album-openers were so beloved that they remained among the Top 5 most-played Eagles songs.
Can there be a better argument for placing them at No. 1 in the track listing? Here’s a ranked look back at every Eagles album opening song:
No. 8. “Get Over It”
From: Hell Freezes Over (1994)
Seemingly prone to bad moods, Don Henley returned to the Eagles with a glum song that draws out the worst of those tendencies. Even a scalding turn on the slide from Joe Walsh can’t get things back on track as Henley un-ironically calls out others for “all this bitching, moaning, pitching a fit.” Still, it had been almost 15 years since the Eagles had last released a single, so “Get Over It” reached the Top 40 anyway.
No. 7. “No More Walks in the Wood”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)
A vocal showcase in the style of “Seven Bridges Road,” the Eagles Live single that just missed the Top 20, but this innocuous cousin lacks Steve Young’s distinctive lyrical imagery.
No. 6. “Doolin-Dalton”
From: Desperado (1973)
“Doolin-Dalton” was a great scene-setter. Maybe too great. The Eagles ended up taking the iffy Old West subject too far, while returning to this song’s musical theme an utterly unneeded number of times – including both an instrumental version and an album-closing reprise.
No. 5. “Already Gone”
From: On the Border (1974)
You could partly blame “Locomotive Breath” for the Eagles’ split with Glyn Johns while recording this album. “We’re taking a beating opening for Jethro Tull,” Frey said in 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, “and our feeling was, ‘We gotta have some kick-ass songs.'” They started with “Already Gone,” as the Eagles and new producer Bill Szymczyk shifted to the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Just-added guitarist Don Felder also brought a sharp new edge. “The great thing for me about [“Already Gone”] is that I left England behind,” Frey said in the liner notes for Eagles: The Very Best, “and had a much more positive energy in the studio.”
No. 4. “The Long Run”
From: The Long Run (1979)
The Eagles had scaled the mountain top, reaching an era-defining plateau with Hotel California. There was, really, nowhere to go but down. Still, as the title track from the band’s final classic-era album makes clear, they intended to go down swinging. “We were beginning to see press articles about how we were passe,” Henley later told Rolling Stone. “Those kinds of jabs were part of the inspiration for the song ‘The Long Run’: Who is gonna make it? We’ll find out in the long run.'” Of course, the group promptly imploded. But their legacy only grew, eventually leading the Eagles back for an improbable ’90s-era reunion.
No. 3. “One of These Nights”
From: One of These Nights (1975)
The goal was to break the ballad template, stirring in contemporary R&B sounds and a sneaky lyric that pulls no punches. Everything was coming together for Frey and Henley, who were quickly emerging as the group’s undisputed co-leaders. Still, newcomer Don Felder played a huge role in helping the Eagles shed their country-rock pretensions. He arranged the unforgettable bass and guitar signature for “One of These Nights,” and his searing solo then neatly underscores this chart-topping song’s bitter sense of missed opportunities.
No. 2. “Take It Easy”
From: Eagles (1972)
This career-opening track perfectly sums up their early country-rock aesthetic, so much so that Glenn Frey said its first few jangly guitar strums “felt like an announcement, ‘And now … the Eagles.'” The impetus for “Take It Easy,” however, came from elsewhere: Jackson Browne, a then-unknown singer-songwriter who lived next door to Frey, couldn’t finish a new song. “Take It Easy” kept stopping cold on the second verse after “Well, I’m a-standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.” Then Frey had an idea. A statue commemorating the next line has since been erected in Winslow, paired with a painting of a girl in a flatbed Ford.
No. 1. “Hotel California”
From: Hotel California (1976)
Turns out this song’s off-the-cuff brilliance wasn’t so off-the-cuff. The concluding twin-guitar solo has moved into classic-rock lore, representing the most famous in a series of fiery collaborations between Felder and the recently installed Joe Walsh. But it wasn’t improvised at all. Instead, the completed Eagles song mirrors — almost note for note, at Henley’s insistence — the original instrumental demo that Felder created at home. A call to Felder’s housekeeper led to a frantic search through his cassettes. She then put the found tape into a boombox and played it through the phone so Walsh and Felder could learn the original twin solos.
Eagles Albums Ranked
The Eagles have been rightly praised for their canny combining of Glenn Frey’s city-slicker R&B with Don Henley’s country-fried rockabilly. But which LP goes this distance?
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
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