Lyin eyes by the eagles4/17/2024 ![]() I mentioned “One of These Nights.” A couple years later Frey and Henley also wrote “The Long Run,” a sly, nasty little number on which Henley’s vocal and the other musical elements – Joe Walsh’s mocking slide guitar, the cheerful harmonies, the organ – are in perfect collusion. A song about an asshole? Hallelujah and why not. For, after all, what’s “Lyin’ Eyes” about but the curdling of the Eagles’ own dreams as Lear jets and cocaine complicated the lives of former Linda Ronstadt backup musicians? So impervious to irony are the songwriters that when Frey sings, “She’s so far gone she feels just like a fool” there’s no suggestion that Frey is the fool. ![]() Steeped in bad faith, “Lyin’ Eyes” is a lie. On the same album’s “One of These Nights,” on which Henley sings lead, the character acts as if he were one of the men who could have slept with the “she” in “Lyin’ Eyes.” Thanks to Henley’s weathered, thin, faintly effeminate timbre, the character could be the woman in ‘Lyin’ Eyes.” A superior performance and song, approximating Frey’s ambitions about the period. “She’s headed for the cheatin’ side of town” is a line that Gram Parsons would’ve sung with wit, that George Jones would have suffused with so much pathos that the listener might feel creeped out eavesdropping. Second, with Frey at the mike, “Lyin’ Eyes” sounds cramped, devoid of generosity. ![]() “Lyin’ Eyes” is not about the chick so much as the guy naive enough to have trusted her, to keep trusting her Bernie Leadon’s typically excellent mandolin work emphasizes the sour grapes (Leadon, not long for this change, skedaddled not long afterward). Two things grate about “Lyin’ Eyes.” First, the precision of the arrangement, normally a virtue, is in scary congruence with Frey. Hundreds of guitarslingers from Robert Johnson to Richard Thompson have specialized in songs about disciplining these devil women. This trope is as archetypal as they come men learn that women matter insofar as they remind them of their sweet, angelic mamas. But Frey, who wrote most of it with Henley’s help, channeled the purported danger into the lyrics: a narrative about a dumb chick not actress enough to hide her promiscuity. “Lyin’ Eyes” did not have that beat, nor were the guitars dangerous. “We thought, ‘Well, how can we write something with that flavor, with that kind of beat, and still have the dangerous guitars?'” Frey told Cameron Crowe in 2003. Enter Don Felder, a journeyman guitarist who’d given a young Tom Petty lessons in Gainesville and had kicked it with the Eagles during tour rehearsals. Keeping an eye on their bottom line, leaders Glenn Frey and Don Henley watched the Laurel Canyon acoustic country-rock scene from which they had drawn sustenance slip into desuetude as a afternoon variety show kind of story-song, epitomized by David Geddes’ “Run Joey Run” and Gordon Lightfoot, gripped the Hot 1oo. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.īy 1975 the Eagles had scored a few hits, made some dough. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. ![]() ![]() I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. ![]()
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