(Credits: Far Out / Don Henley)
Wed 24 December 2025 17:00, UK
For Don Henley, the Eagles’ status as another great California rock act was never going to be good enough.
He had the ability to write classic songs if he worked with Glenn Frey, and while they had a rough start, they wanted to go down in history in the same breath as their idols like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It was a daunting task for anyone to measure up to, but even if everything works out in your favour, that doesn’t mean every single record has to be great behind the scenes, either.
Granted, it’s not like Henley was expecting perfection right out of the gate. The debut Eagles record was bound to have a few rough edges, but even if songs like ‘Earlybird’ were considered a little bit corny compared to the usual hits in their catalogue, it was better for them to have variety and not be pigeonholed into one sound when making tracks like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’.
And when listening to their records in order, you can hear them slowly starting to come into their own as songwriters. Desperado may have been an absolute dud on the charts, but the title track is one of the finest songs that Henley and Frey ever wrote together, and their subsequent records were all about taking it one step further. Some may have been a nightmare to make like working on On the Border, but there was also a fair amount of wiggle room for them to experiment with songs and make classics like the disco beat on ‘One of These Nights’ or the rocking ‘Already Gone’.
Right when they were about to reach their creative pinnacle, though, the record company had to step in. The band had already gone through four albums and gained Joe Walsh in the group for their next tour, so whatever was happening next needed to be huge, but the idea of getting a greatest hits record out around the same time as Hotel California managed to get them in the upper echelon of artists. So now with all of that momentum paying off, what the hell were they supposed to do next?
After all, the business practically swallowed them whole after Hotel California, and when listening to their escapades on tour, it’s not like everyone was itching to head back into the studio. And with Randy Meisner having since left and the band having no new material written, Henley felt that it was more than a chore getting the right songs on The Long Run. If anything, it was like pulling teeth.
Everyone knew that they needed to keep their track record up, but Henley said nothing felt right when working on the record, saying, “[We were] exhausted, burned-out mentally, physically, spiritually. Homesick. But the Beast needed feeding. Momentum had to be maintained, or so we were fooled into thinking. The recording of every one of our albums had moments of ecstasy and agony. That’s just the way the process works. But if I had to choose an overall least favorite time, [it] was the recording of The Long Run.”
And it’s not exactly hard to hear the frustration in a lot of the takes as well. Some of the hits are definitely there like the title track and the rocking ‘Heartache Tonight’, but if you hear the weariness in Henley’s voice on a track like ‘The Sad Cafe’, he was clearly ready to hang things up after one too many long nights trying to find something that worked for a song.
But despite all of the hangups that went into the record, the fact that it still holds up as a fairly decent project really speaks to the track record they set for themselves. It wasn’t exactly perfect, but for a band that had made some of the greatest music of the 1970s, the fact that this would have been considered subpar is a miracle, especially considering they broke up midway through the tour.
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