Eagles take off with first album since 1979

By Ray Waddell

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - In this exclusive interview, Glenn Frey takes Billboard through the making of "Long Road Out of Eden," the Eagles' first studio album since 1979. "Eden" is due October 30, exclusively via Wal-Mart stores.

BILLBOARD: TELL ME ABOUT THE SONGWRITING AND RECORDING

PROCESSES FOR "LONG ROAD OUT OF EDEN."

We've been working on this album kind of piecemeal up until the last 21 months, but prior to that what was happening on my end was, if I heard a song or I started writing a song that I thought was right for the Eagles, then I would hang onto it and kind of set it aside and say "I think this could go on our record." Through the course of the late 90s and the early part of (this) century, that was what we did.

There were times when we would work for a little while, but we could never really get everybody together to work for any long periods of time mainly because we all live in different places and we all have families. So, it became a little more difficult to parcel our time to work on the record, but in the last 21 months obviously we found a lot of time. Don (Henley) made a lot of sacrifices by coming to L.A. often to work on the record, coming from Dallas.

Don and I had a couple of very productive songwriting periods over the last couple of years. During those times we wrote "Busy Being Fabulous," "Fast Company," (and) we had started on "Long Road Out of Eden" way back in 2001. It was such a long song when we cut the track and tried to imagine verses and bridges and instrumental and all of that stuff, and I honestly didn't know that that song would ever get completed. Then Don just had a burst of inspiration and he told me one day "I think I've got the lyrics for 'Long Road."' And I said, "really?" It was a pretty long piece of material to begin with, but he did a great job finishing that song.

Other songs that we wrote together, (such as) "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture" and a couple of other tunes, in some cases we would have a chorus and some chords, and we would cut the track before we would finish the song if we thought we could come out with some good structure, and we just worked on it here and there when we could. As the record really started to take shape and when we finally got ourselves eight to 10 songs that were close to finished, then there was another big rush of material. That seems like it happens almost every time at the end of a record. You start to get your creative juices flowing and other songs show up, other ideas show up.

Don has a studio in Malibu and I have a studio in L.A. I would work on things on my own with other band members at my studio and Don would work on things on his own with other band members at his studio, and then we would MP3 our work back and forth to each other. When it came time to do background vocals we would do those and it turned out to be a very effective way for us to finish this project.