{"id":446,"date":"2007-11-02T15:43:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T15:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2007\/11\/02\/long-road-out-of-eagles"},"modified":"2026-07-01T13:25:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T19:25:51","slug":"long-road-out-of-eagles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/long-road-out-of-eagles\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Road Out of Eagles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
The Eagles have just released Long Road Out of Eden<\/span><\/a>, their first new album in two decades. Half of it is a triumphant return to the bleached blonde country sound that made them great. The other half is bloated pretentious nonsense where Don Henley sings crap like \u201cWe worship at the marketplace while common sense is going out of style.\u201d Yeah, consumerism is destroying us, isn\u2019t it, Don? Incidentally, the new Eagles album is available exclusively at Wal-Mart.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, Eden<\/span> is a double album, and they\u2019ve kept the political drivel pretty well isolated on the second CD. Disc One is politics free, except for the execrable opening track, \u201cNo More Walks In The Wood,\u201d a ponderous a capella ballad lamenting the fact that all the forests in the world have been cut down, presumably to make paper for the twenty-page booklet that accompanies the CD.<\/p>\n

The album soars with the next track, \u201cHow Long,\u201d which sounds right at home when compared to Eagles classics like \u201cTake It Easy\u201d and \u201cThe Long Run.\u201d It\u2019s the first single off the album, and it\u2019s easy to see why. It\u2019s a joyous, pseudo-country celebration, and it may be the best track of the whole album, but it\u2019s not necessarily an easy call. The rest of Disc One is just as good, although the Timothy B. Schmit numbers are heavy on the schmaltz, and even in his apolitical \u201crelationship\u201d songs, Don Henley repeatedly demonstrates why he ought to be force fed anti-depressants. Later, on Disc Two, Henley sings: \u201cIt\u2019s a soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking world,\u201d ignoring the fact that when he sings, he\u2019s the one sucking the souls. Have you ever been cheerful, Don? Have you never been mellow?<\/p>\n

Henley is the real problem here. His distinctive, smoky tenor voice has made him the group\u2019s centerpiece, which is just fine as long as he\u2019s lending said voice to decent material. Instead, as we wander into the wilderness of Disc Two, Henley uses his considerable vocal talents to sing Noam Chomsky\u2019s Greatest Hits. Don sings better than Noam, but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

Consider the album\u2019s title track, \u201cLong Road Out of Eden,\u201d which kicks off the second disc. It\u2019s endless \u2013 over ten minutes long \u2013 as well as endlessly silly. Henley contrasts the experience of a soldier on patrol in Iraq with oil company executives blasting music from their SUVs in the \u201cgood ol\u2019 USA,\u201d where they eat lunch at the \u201cPetroleum Club, smokin\u2019 fine cigars and swapping lies\u201d and say things like \u201cgimme \u2018nother slice o\u2019 that barbecued brisket.\u201d You\u2019re being very subtle – just what you\u2019re trying to say here, Don? Don\u2019t smoke? You\u2019re not particularly fond of barbecued brisket?<\/p>\n

No. In case you missed the moral of the story, Henley ends the song by telling you flat out that \u201cthe road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste.\u201d See, the point is that oil company execs are very bad. No blood for oil. We shall overcome, or something.<\/p>\n

Henley\u2019s gasbaggery is followed by a brief instrumental from Glenn Frey called \u201cI Dreamed There Was No War,\u201d Apparently, when there\u2019s no war, people will strum namby-pamby little ditties that will conjure images of Saddam Hussein and Barney holding hands and skipping through flower beds. The Eagles\u2019 grasp of geopolitical realities is equivalent to that of my six-year-old son, who thinks that Worm Man and Fox Man should stop blowing up buildings and just go jump on the trampoline together.<\/a> I\u2019d be happy to do that if they would. And they wouldn\u2019t. So unilaterally jumping on the trampoline doesn\u2019t do anyone any good.<\/p>\n

Still, Henley doesn\u2019t give up. In \u201cBusiness as Usual,\u201d he complains that \u201cwe\u2019ve got the prettiest White House that money can buy, sitting up there in that Beltway Bubble.\u201d In what may be the album\u2019s most tedious polemic, \u201cFrail Grasp on the Big Picture,\u201d Don laments about how stupid all of us are, mainly because we \u201cpray to our Lord, who we know is American.\u201d How ignorant. Everyone knows that God is Belgian.<\/p>\n

Henley clearly despises the USA, which leads one to wonder why he bothers to stay here. After all, this nation is an oppressive empire builder, a wretched police state that suppresses the delicate genius that is Henley. What these troubled junior high school poets fail to recognize is that if they were really living in a police state, they\u2019d be strung up by their thumbs in Hussein\u2019s rape rooms or Ahmejinedad\u2019s Homes for Non-Existent Homosexuals. They wouldn\u2019t have their CDs cluttering up the Wal-Mart sales racks.<\/p>\n

Disc Two isn\u2019t all bad. It has a nice little Joe Walsh number called \u201cLast Good Time In Town\u201d that is reminiscent of his earlier \u201cPretty Maids All in a Row.\u201d The album ends with a strange Glenn Frey track called \u201cIt\u2019s Your World Now,\u201d where he sounds like he\u2019s either going to die or play bingo. \u201cMy race is run,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m moving on, like the setting sun.\u201d Apparently, we shouldn\u2019t expect a follow up album any time soon.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s OK. There\u2019s plenty to enjoy here for now. Transfer Disc One into your iPod without the first track, and pick and choose a few tracks of Disc Two. Then throw the CDs away along with your leftover barbecued brisket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\" The Eagles have just released Long Road Out of Eden<\/span><\/a>, their first new album in two decades. Half of it is a triumphant return to the bleached blonde country sound that made them great. The other half is bloated pretentious nonsense where Don Henley sings crap like \u201cWe worship at the marketplace while common ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5237,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/5237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}