Before the advent of the streaming playlist era, creating a big finish for your LP was a big deal. It’s clear that the Eagles understood the assignment.
Not every one of the following album closing songs was necessarily a huge success, but this band always made a point of ending each studio project with a statement moment. In one case, they added the very first Eagles chart-topping single. On not one but two occasions, the final track on an Eagles LP represented a goodbye to co-founding members, first with Bernie Leadon and then with Glenn Frey.
Back then, this decision-making process could be almost as important to a group as how their long players began. Luckily for the Eagles, they were pretty good at that, too. Four of their albums began with Top 40 hits, including an No. 8 smash. That meant the Eagles could afford to get creative, wrapping things up in offbeat ways that could be quite surprising.
READ MORE: Ranking Every Eagles Solo Album
Stalwart leader Don Henley ended a pair of Eagles albums with two of his most complex and moving songs. On the other hand, one of fellow original member Randy Meisner’s very best rockers found a home as the last song on Side Two, despite his penchant for soaring balladry. For all of his outsize influence on the group as they shifted from rootsy pickers to stadium rockers, Joe Walsh never had an album-closing Eagles song.
The following look back covers the six classic-era Eagles albums released between 1972-1979, as well as their 2000s-era finale. Here are the Eagles Album Closing Songs Ranked Worst to Best:
No. 7. “I Wish You Peace”
From: One of These Nights (1975)
Away from Eagles, Bernie Leadon has been a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. So you might have expected his last released Eagles track to be representative of that Americana-inflected history. Instead, Leadon shared writing duties on this slow-death elegy with live-in girlfriend Patti Davis – daughter of future President Ronald Reagan, who had all but disowned her for cohabitating with the Eagles cofounder. Henley, and he was being kind, dismissed the results as “smarmy cocktail music.”
No. 6. “It’s Your World Now”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)
This song’s quietly effective sentiment became all the more appropriate in the wake of Glenn Frey’s sudden death. Unfortunately, its impact will always be governed by someone’s willingness to endure a musical setting best described as “family-restaurant mariachi band.”
No. 5. “Tryin'”
From: Eagles (1972)
Just because Randy Meisner had such facility with heartsick balladry doesn’t mean he couldn’t catch a groove. His original “Tryin'” finally gave Meisner a worthy piece of material on their first LP, but not until the very last moments.
No. 4. “Bitter Creek”
From: Desperado (1973)
Leadon wrote and sang this album’s final original, before the largely pointless “Doolin-Dalton”/”Desperado” reprise closes out Desperado. The track begins just as you’d expect from the Eagles’ stalwart traditionalist: reserved country rock – maybe too reserved. But then something happens about three minutes in, when the rest of the group joins Leadon’s wordless harmonizing on the outro. “Bitter Creek” takes flight.
No. 3. “The Last Resort”
From: Hotel California (1976)
Don Henley would explicitly tie “The Last Resort” to his growing activism over environmental issues, and there is certainly plenty of righteous anger directly relating to our poor stewardship. But, in context, this always felt like something more than another of his political screeds. Instead, an album defined by empty dissolution ends the only way it could: with a lonesome figure, surrounded by wreckage of his own making.
No. 2. “The Sad Cafe”
From: The Long Run (1979)
Despite reloading with Timothy B. Schmit, a malaise had clearly crept in. The Long Run was dotted with halfhearted efforts before the Eagles finally righted things with this cinematic album-closer. In many ways, “The Sad Cafe” sets a template for Henley’s subsequent solo career, as he offers a darkly ruminative examination of love lost. But it wouldn’t have been such a fitting finale without Don Felder‘s elegiac, utterly virtuosic turn on guitar.
No. 1. “Best of My Love”
From: On the Border (1974)
“Best of My Love” is remembered today as the Eagles’ breakthrough single, but there was a bit of controversy involved with reaching that goal. Seems the band’s label shortened the song for airplay — without clearing anything beforehand. It went from 4:34 on 1974’s On the Border to 3:25 on the AM radio edit, while becoming the first of five ’70s-era chart-toppers for the Eagles. That so infuriated everyone that the band came up with an ingenious plan, hacking a piece out of a 45 single covered in gold paint then presenting it to the bosses at the Asylum Records offices. Message received.
Eagles Live Albums Ranked Worst to Best
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
Listen to Don Felder on the ‘UCR Podcast’
