FLIGHTS OF FANCY

TRYIN’

The Eagles seemed to arrive fully formed on their self-titled debut album. Take It Easy was the big pop hit, and Train Leaves Here This Morning showed they could do back-porch country, but it was this that proved the Eagles could rock out as well as anyone.

CERTAIN KIND OF FOOL

Henley and Frey locked in their songwriting partnership on second album, Desperado, but it wasn’t a closed shop. Certain Kind Of Fool, co-written and sung by Meisner, added a power-pop punch to the band’s dusty Wild West fantasising.

MY MAN

Guitarist Bernie leadon had the best pre-Eagles pedigree: he’d played with country-rock visionary Gram Parsons in the Flying Burrito Brothers. My Man, from 1974’s On The Border, was his heartfelt tribute to Parsons, who had died the previous september.

TOO MANY HANDS

The Eagles never really played the guitar-hero game, but when they did they could mix it with the best of them. And never more so than on this Randy Meisner/Don Felder co-write from 1975’s One Of

These Nights. As Henley weaves a tabla rhythm, Felder and leadon wring all manner of scorching noise from their instruments.

JOURNEY OF THE SORCERER

God knows what leadon was on when he came up with this epic country-sci-fi instrumental, its interstellar hybrid of sweeping strings, cowpoke banjo and deepspace ambience remaining out there on its own in the Eagles canon. Maverick sci-fi writer Douglas Adams clocked its bat-shit genius – he used it as the theme tune to the original radio version of

Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

THE LAST RESORT

Hard to pick a deep cut from an album that’s sold more than 31 million copies, but Hotel California’s stately seven-and-a-half-minute closing track remains the greatest ballad they wrote. An early environmental protest anthem, it showed that the Eagles dug much deeper than their detractors would admit, and proved that Henley was a very underrated lyricist of the era.

THE DISCO STRANGLER

1979’s The Long Run was the Eagles’ most under-appreciated album – and their darkest. This ball of wired disco-rock was its most disturbing moment: a tense, nervous headache of a song that finds Henley casting a jaundiced eye over the mindless hedonism of the new generation. Hypocritical? Maybe. Misogynist? Possibly. But utterly representative of where the Eagles were at that point.

SEVEN BRIDGES ROAD

The band were effectively done by the time the in-concert album

Eagles Live was released in November 1980. But the tensions that drove them apart were nowhere to be heard on this coruscating cover of country singer steve Young’s 1969 song; those stellar harmonies had never sounded so earthly and unearthly at the same time. They open their current show with it today, and it sounds as astonishing as ever.

LOVE WILL KEEP US ALIVE

Timothy B schmit was more than just Randy Meisner’s replacement, he brought a crystal-clear high note to the band’s interlocking chorus of voices. He swiftly became the band’s ballad king, first on 1979’s hit single I Can’t Tell You Why, and then 15 years later on this, one of the four new tracks from comeback album Hell Freezes Over.

LONG ROAD OUT OF EDEN

Henley revisited an old theme on the title track from the Eagles’ first studio album in 28 years: the ecological damage wreaked by humankind. such a huge subject deserved a huge frame, and it got one: at 10 minutes, it’s the longest track they ever recorded, switching from smouldering to incendiary to desolate. ‘Bloated with entitlement, loaded with propaganda, and now we’re driving dazed and

drunk,’ Henley spat, burying that ‘mellow’ tag once and for all.