Credit: Far Out / Album Cover
Sun 2 August 2026 21:30, UK
Don Henley tended to have a much more serious outlook on what the Eagles were supposed to be.
It didn’t seem like the California icons needed to make some of the greatest rock music of all time when they first started, but Henley was the one daring to ask the question: ‘What if we didn’t always write about the sunny side of life?’ It was a question worth discussing, but that didn’t mean that any of their albums needed to cut out any of the laid-back and breezy songs in their catalogue, either.
The band had their teeth on some of the greatest care-free tunes of all time, and when you look at the titles of some of their songs, it’s not like they had to be that deep. ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, ‘Saturday Night’. None of these is supposed to be one of the biggest musical epiphanies anyone has ever put to vinyl, but Henley did feel like there was some sense of progression going on, even on those first albums.
Most of them hadn’t thought about writing together, but even when they were writing via committee, Henley and Glenn Frey at least knew a good hook when they heard one. ‘Witchy Woman’ had Henley’s smoky voice on top of everything, Frey was the perfect person to deliver ‘Take it Easy’, and they even had a few rockers on the album too, but Desperado was a case of the band trying to go up way too fast when looking at their track record.
They didn’t have what it took to become one of the biggest bands in the world just yet, but a concept record centred around the outlaws of the West is the kind of concept made by someone who thinks they can do anything. And while there are some beautiful songs across that record, it’s not like the rest of the public was ready to see every member suddenly adopt cowboy personas and lean even further into country music with every single song they made.
Even Henley thought that the concept of the piece was absolute crap, but that didn’t mean Frey couldn’t hit the nail on the head when making ‘Tequila Sunrise’. This was the point in the record where there was a bit of respite from the constant outlaw mythmaking, and the picture of a bunch of rock stars singing in harmony about having a couple of drinks to summon up the courage to talk to girls is the kind of inspired idea that would have worked perfectly without the concept.
And even years after the fact, Henley felt that the song never truly lost its lustre for him, saying, “That’s one song I don’t get tired of. “Take another shot of courage” refers to tequila — because we used to call it ‘instant courage.’ We very much wanted to talk to the ladies, but we often didn’t have the nerve, so we’d drink a couple of shots and suddenly it was, ‘Howdy, ma’am.’” But a lot of that nostalgia does have to do with what the song stands for aside from beginning one of their first great singles.
Further reading: From The Vault
The whole idea started as a germ of an idea that Frey was thinking about when working on a Roy Orbison-style rhythm, and after working on the song a bit more, it became the first official Frey/Henley song that they ever wrote together. And even if the entire album failed as a whole, that wasn’t going to stop them from continuing down that same road when working on some of their later material.
They had discovered the magic one way or the other, and Henley figured that they didn’t need to have the most high-energy song to leave an impact. All that mattered was whether or not they had a story to tell, and every piece of this song was filled to the brim with the kind of tale that every single rocker knew all too well whenever they took a couple of shots to ease their nerves at the bar.
