Bernie Leadon’s 11 Eagles Songs Ranked

There are close to 200 Eagles songs out there, recorded by the band over the course of seven studio albums. Bernie Leadon‘s name can be found as either the primary writer or cowriter on just 11 of them.

But don’t let that number fool you — the multi-instrumentalist was one of California’s most consistent presences in the ’60s and ’70s in particular, and an inspiration to his friends and family back home in Florida.

Leadon’s little brother, Tom, was a member of Tom Petty‘s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch. “Petty and [Tom] Leadon were talking about going to California,” guitarist Mike Campbell wrote in his memoir, Heartbreaker. “Of leaving Gainesville and making it, like Bernie had.”

Make it he did, and we believe that Leadon’s 11 Eagles songs are some of the best in the band’s catalog. Below, we’ve ranked them.

11. “Twenty-One”
From: Desperado (1973)

Leadon wrote two songs on his own for 1973’s Desperado. One of them, “Twenty-One,” is at the bottom of this list, and the other we’ll get to much later. “Twenty-One” refers to the age of Emmett Dalton. He was the youngest of the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the outlaw group which the Eagles wrote all of the album’s songs about. “I don’t recall, exactly,” Don Henley said to Rolling Stone in 2016, “but I think that Glenn [Frey] showed them the book of outlaw photos and explained the general premise of what we were going for.” This song sure fits the theme, but isn’t super memorable beyond that.

 

10.  “Earlybird”
From: Eagles (1972)

Yes, those are real bird sounds in “Earlybird,” even if they were taken from a sound effects library. “I thought – and still think – it was corny, but it wasn’t my song,” Henley said in the aforementioned Rolling Stone interview. “Adding the chirping sounds was the decision of both the song’s author and our producer [Glyn Johns]. Forty-four years later, it really doesn’t matter, does it?” Leadon cowrote the track with bassist Randy Meisner.

 

9. “Saturday Night”
From: Desperado (1973)

Leadon, Henley, Frey and Meisner all came together to write “Saturday Night.” Henley’s solo vocal is lovely, and so are the harmonies, but the song doesn’t really go much of anywhere.

 

8. “Hollywood Waltz”
From: One of These Nights (1975)

In 1973, Bernie and Tom Leadon lived together in California, where the blooming acacia plants inspired Tom to write a song about the beauty of the environment. Two years later, Tom got a call from Bernie, who was working with the Eagles in Miami on an album that would eventually be called One of These Nights. Bernie asked about the old song, and told Tom that he planned on showing it to his bandmates so they could use it on the album. In an interview with gainesvillerockhistory.com, Tom recalled that he didn’t ask to hear the finished product. “I had enough respect for them as songwriters,” he said. “They made it into a Hollywood Southern California thing to fit the concept of the album, kind of philosophically about life in L.A.”

 

7. “Journey of the Sorcerer”
From: One of These Nights (1975)

Rolling Stone once described “Journey of the Sorcerer” as “bluegrass psychedelia.” That’s an awfully accurate description for the six-minute instrumental track that later became the theme to the comedic sci-fi BBC show The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Leadon is listed as its sole writer, basing the song around his Huber VRB-75 banjo.

 

6. “I Wish You Peace”
From: One of These Nights (1975)

It was a love story for the ages: Leadon and Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald Reagan. The two of them cowrote “I Wish You Peace” for 1975’s One of These Nights, despite the rest of the band not wanting to include it on the album. At that time, Davis’ dad was the Republican Governor of California and her mom, Nancy, didn’t approve of her unmarried daughter living with a man. Maybe “I Wish You Peace” is a little schmaltzy, but there are worse things to be.

 

5.  “On the Border”
From: On the Border (1974)

On the Border, both the album as a whole and its title track, is where things get a little funky, or at least where the Eagles tried to distance themselves a bit from the “country rock” label they’d been getting up until then. Henley, Frey and Leadon are all listed as cowriters.

4. “Witchy Woman”
From: Eagles (1972)

Leadon had already started writing “Witchy Woman” back when he was a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers. When he showed what he had to Henley, the rest of it came together. “Bernie was living way out in Topanga Canyon,” Henley recalled to Cameron Crowe in 2003, “but he came over one day and started playing this strange, minor-key riff that sounded sort of like a Hollywood movie version of Indian music — you know, the kind of stuff they play when the Indians ride up on the ridge while the wagon train passes below.”

 

3. “Train Leaves Here This Morning”
From: Eagles (1972)

This is another song Leadon brought over to the Eagles from previous years. “Train Leaves Here This Morning,” is a melancholic little country number Leadon cowrote with Gene Clark when they were both part of the group Dillard & Clark. The original version of the song appeared on the 1968 album The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. Of course, a highlight of the Eagles’ version is Frey’s guitar work.

 

2. “Bitter Creek”
From: Desperado (1973)

Yes, “Bitter Creek” is something of a reserved song, but the arrangement here is so smooth. Additionally: Crosby, Stills & Nash aren’t the only ones with incredible harmony-singing skills, and this song proves it.

 

1. “My Man”
From: On the Border (1974)

In the opinion of this writer, “My Man” isn’t just the best Eagles song written by Leadon, it’s one of the best in the band’s entire catalog. The song was written in tribute to Leadon’s late friend and bandmate, Gram Parsons, who passed away from a drug overdose in 1973. To Leadon, the Eagles were following in the wake Parsons created. “The Eagles commercialized what Gram synthesized,” he said to Harvard Magazine in 2023. In any case, “My Man” is a beautiful tribute to a friend who brought a lot of joy to various people’s lives: “We who must remain go on laughing just the same.”