Don’s singing abilities stretched so many of our boundaries. You’re not going to find that track on a Crosby, Stills & Nash record or Beach Boys record. We did a big Philly-type production with strings - definitely not country-rock. He could stand out there all alone and just wail. I sent for some sheet music so I could learn some of those songs, and I started creating my own musical ideas with that Philly influence. As Frey wrote in the liner notes to The Very Best Of The Eagles, “I loved all the records coming out of Philadelphia at that time. Perhaps the most left-field departure of them all was “Wasted Time,” a song where co-writers Glenn Frey and Don Henley dared to display their blue-eyed soul. The album found room for the sinewy mid-tempo groove of the title track, the crunching rock of “Victim Of Love” and “Life In The Fast Lane,” and the epic sweep of “The Last Resort.” But the addition of Joe Walsh on guitar allowed the band to spread its wings, so to speak, on Hotel California.

Early hits like “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise” and “The Best Of My Love” certainly fit the bill. Up to that point in their career, it would have been fair to lump the band within the genre of country-tinged soft rock. In addition to the obvious fact that it’s just a top-notch collection of songs, one reason for its preeminence in the band’s catalog is that it showcased their versatility. Then I thought of myself as ‘Nowhere Man’ – sitting in his nowhere land.” The song glides from thereon in a fitting fashion-like the moment you stop forcing the saw is the moment it slides along like its cutting butter.įollow Far Out Magazine across our social channels, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.Critics, fans, and the band themselves are in general agreement that 1976’s Hotel California represents the peak of The Eagles’ illustrious career. I was cheesed off and went for a lie-down, having given up.

No, I remember now, I’d actually stopped trying to think of something. As Lennon affirms: “Once I’d thought of that, it was easy. Not bad for something scratched up on the carpet following a nap.Īfter all, sometimes, that’s the most creative place to be. Aside from the revenue generated from the finished product, the original hand-written lyrics themselves fetched a pretty penny, selling for $455,500 at an auction in New York in 2003. It was a stint of idleness that proved incredibly profitable for the Fab Four too. Just as the lyrics suggest: “Knows not where he’s going to / Isn’t he a bit like you and me?” – the protagonist is far from alone. “I thought of myself sitting there,” Lennon once reflected, “Doing nothing and getting nowhere,” and that’s very much the same quandary that the protagonist of the piece finds himself in. He treated it as a third-person song, but he was clever enough to say, ‘Isn’t he a bit like you and me?’ – ‘Me’ being the final word.” “It was in a period where he was a bit dissatisfied with what was going on,” Macca recalled, depicting a period for The Beatles when they were coming age in the adult sense amid the biggest fanfare the world has ever seen.

Wasted time lyrics