Eagles: The Long Road Out Of Eden - 2007


This album, recorded twenty-eight years since their previous one, is a sprawling, way, way too long double album containing an hour and a half's blatantly retrospective Eagles music. 

It is full of jangling riffs and those trademark freeway driving vocals - AOR rockers and AOR ballads and it seems as if the band had never been away. Can I trawl through it, analysing in detail track after track of generically-similar music? No, I guess not. It is suffice to say that I can dip into any of this album at any time and thoroughly enjoy it. The sound quality is uniformly excellent and the band, often at each others' throats over the years, sound as if they really enjoyed recording it. 

Roughly, the album can be separated by its two CDs - the first recalling the smooth country rock of the seventies while the second looks back, sonically, to the eighties and has many vibes of Don Henley's The End Of The Innocence album. This is only to an extent, though, because much of the second half of the first part is also distinctly eighties-style Henley-esque. There are highlights worthy of individual mention, however. How Long has an obviously Take It Easy riff and melody to it and is classic Eagles fare. 

The appealing Busy Being Fabulous is a track that would have fitted fine on the afore-mentioned Don Henley album, The End Of The Innocence. Guilty Of the Crime is a great, upbeat riffy grinder. A favourite of mine is the Springsteen-esque (in places) No More Cloudy Days. Do Something is beautiful, as is I Don’t Want To Hear Any More. 

The ten-minute Long Road Out Of Eden is a chugging, mightily impressive Jackson Browne-influenced cynical diatribe about the state of the world and the USA in 2007. I Dreamed There Was No War is a lovely, short guitar instrumental and Somebody has a gritty rocking thump to it. 

Frail Grasp On The Big Picture is another socially motivated number, with strong echoes of Life In The Fast Lane to it. The Last Good Time In Town has a laid-back Chris Rea sound to its rhythm. Look, I could compliment each and every track on here - they are all good, not a duffer anywhere to be found. 


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