Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr
Sat 14 June 2025 21:00, UK
Every one of the Eagles ran a particularly tight ship when they first started. If a song wasn’t good enough to make it on the record, Don Henley and Glenn Frey would never roll over and put something out simply to satisfy someone’s ego. They were aiming for perfection every single time they made music, but sometimes the best songs don’t necessarily have to come from their songbook, either.
After all, some of the band’s best music on their debut album came from other people. Jack Tempchin had been responsible for writing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, and despite Frey contributing to the song ‘Take It Easy’, it was primarily written by Jackson Browne before he filled in the lines about dreaming about a girl slowing down in a flatbed Ford in Winslow, Arizona.
But the common thread behind every one of their songs is that they are standalone stories. Henley and Frey could have easily kept up the tradition of writing love songs, and while some of their tunes do fall into that category, it’s much more interesting to hear them go back and forth talking about dark characters in their tunes, whether that’s the kid who goes a bit too far in Hollywood on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ or telling some wide-eyed troubadour to put down his guns on ‘Desperado’.
That kind of storytelling may have been commonplace in artists like Bob Dylan, but any song that tells a story like this is indebted to country music. Everyone from George Jones to Johnny Cash was known for creating these cinematic songs when they were starting out, and while country music went in a different direction by the time it hit the next generation, there were still people like Vince Gill willing to push the boundaries of what the genre could do.
Compared to every other band that cites Eagles as an influence, Gill seemed to take every lesson that Henley and Frey had to teach and apply it to his own playing. He could write a tearjerker when he wanted to, but he seemed to be born with Frey’s wit and the chops of Joe Walsh, to the point where he almost plays circles around the guitar legend whenever he went out on tour with the group.
“Don heard me singing at soundcheck and he says ‘What is that? That’s gorgeous. We need to work that up and do it.’ And I said, with all due respect, I’d rather not.”
Vince Gill
While everything that Gill does nowadays is in service to honouring Frey’s memory, he was paid the ultimate compliment when Henley talked about his song ‘Whenever You Come Around’, with the guitarist saying, “Don heard me singing at soundcheck and he says ‘What is that? That’s gorgeous. We need to work that up and do it.’ And I said, with all due respect, I’d rather not. I don’t want to give these people one more reason to not like me. They’re gonna say, ‘I didn’t come out here to hear Vince’s songs. I came to hear the Eagles.’”
But listening to the song, all the pieces are there for a great Eagles hit. It’s not the most uptempo song in the world and certainly isn’t going to replace tracks like ‘New Kid in Town’ in the setlist, but it could have certainly passed for one of the better cuts on either Frey or Henley’s solo records back in the day, almost like a romantic version of what Henley did during the Building the Perfect Beast period.
After years of being the stand-in, though, Gill is hardly becoming the pariah of the group whenever he plays with Eagles. He is as much of a legend as anyone else on that stage, and while he might not be Frey, he has more than enough chops and musical integrity to hang with the best in the business.
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