A Good Day In Hell - The Official ILM Track-By-Track EAGLES Listening Thread

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/articles/article/2601/Donald-Fagen-R_jpg_630x463_pad-black_upscale_q85.jpg

that story from Walsh about Henley & the Hotel California solos made me think of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzpk5dMhVE4

aggggghhh fuck sorry I shouldn't have done that, embed ragh

fp me skott, I deserve it

FWIW, a couple hours ago I drove past the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Walsh at 4:53 is one of my fave moments in rock and roll. His "guitar face" at this moment is the best! Felder's sound completely singular. All those guitars in the R&R HOF clip make me think of BJM.

Thread really delivering today!

This song was already old news to me 20 years ago - I'm 30 now - and yet I never fucking get tired of it, Henley's cod-Mexican accent and portentous lyrics and those lemon-sucking harmonies and all. It's like "Stairway" - just a killer minor-key progression, arrangement, production, everything. So thank you Don Felder and Bill Szymczyk, but kudos as well to the perfect balance of teeth-clenching tension and El Lay cool in Henley's vocal. I mean, dude can sing. Also I'm a sucker for the narcissistic Southern California myth-mongering, which is maybe why the Red Hot Chili Peppers aren't yet completely beyond the pale for me.

what the hell.....

http://youtu.be/Q0F83bK0TZU

"New Kid In Town"

http://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/images/eaglesHCHenleyHoboPants.jpg

http://youtu.be/L7c-P5hAPfg

new screen-name for someone:

HenleyHoboPants.jpg

again, this is kinda unfuckwithable on FM radio. this album/aja/rumours. the holy trinity of FM sound.

This is one of those I-love-it-in-a-Proustian-way songs. Love the vocal and instrumental arrangement, love the slinky guitar solo, love the key change, love Felder and Walsh's work throughout, even the lyrics are pretty good by Frey standards. If the universe judged that I might only be allowed to listen to one Eagles song ever again, this would probably be it.

allegedly the "New Kid" in question was Springsteen, who Frey/Henley saw as muscling into their territory after "Born to Run" hit.

Seems like an odd choice of lead-off single at first, given the collection of rockers they had, but it makes sense: it's meant to appeal to all the people who bought the 72-75 greatest hits record---it's the closest the album gets to a "Tequila Sunrise." There's a Tex-Mex feel to the verses, esp in the keyboard hook.

always liked this one, but it goes on a bit too long, as Eagles songs do---the bridge isn't great, as it's too melodically similar to the rest of it and has the worst set of lyrics. that said, the outro is lovely, w/ the harmonies and the rolling drum fills (punctuated by Henley's trademark way-too-high-mixed cymbal crashes).

hard to fault this

Glenn Frey has the same birthday as Doug Sahm, maybe that's where he gets the Tex-Mex feel.

The harmonies are good!

Ha, the hi-hat isn't panned hard right! They fixed it! But man, 70s production was so flumpfy and dead. In the Springsteen doc about Darkness, he complains about the lack of resonance in the studio, but at the time, that's all there was; that was state-of-the-art in the late 70s. No one wanted any reverby echoey shit, so all the major studios had carpeting on the walls.

This isn't an awful song, though. Might be my favorite (which is to say, least creepy/sleazy) Frey vocal.

by far the best song of theirs to date.

beautiful song imo

it's the cozy blanket of Eagles songs :)

wonder how much of it was owed to J.D. Souther

this is the only Frey vocal on the album--acc to Frey it was a decision he went along with (Henley as the "lead singer" of the Eagles 2.0) but you can see how the henley/Frey partnership begins to fall apart here

I love dead reverbless 70s recordings

I have a visceral dislike for this song and I don't know why! I am trying to give it a fair shot and it just annoys the heck out of me. My best guess is that I have some negative association with it, like it was on the radio when my mom said we couldn't go out for ice cream or something.

Objectively there's nothing wrong with it. I like the guitar/drums at 3:21. It's a little too long. The lyrics are kind of dumb, although not creepy.

You're welcome for the incisive commentary.

i hate "johnny come lately / the new kid in town" as a lyric. it's so lame.

I think I've always taken the lyrics too literally (definite side effect of hearing the song when I was a kid) and am annoyed that these people have such boring lives that they care that much when somebody new comes to town. Also LOL at the town mattress who has no more criteria for the men she lets hold her than their being new in town.

"70s production was so flumpfy and dead."

yeah this brush is too broad. so much to love about the sound of so many 70's records. i wouldn't even know where to begin. but i get the gist of the dead airless argument.

this is their best to date but still an airless recording. I can imagine being sixteen, gay, driving around a dead-end town while this plays on the radio though..

Granted, re: broad brush. There are some dead-arse 70s recordings I love (Parliament, Steely Dan), but applying those principles of sound to everything meant that no (or hardly any) studios existed where one could make a record that had some resonance. And stuff like Anthony Braxton's Arista records really suffer from this.

after the gold rush is super "dead" sounding and that works great

I always found this superlame but that was mostly the lyric - new kids in town always seemed like the most pathetic boast to write about. I can't quite shake that off, but there's no denying the craft here. The whole extended end section - 'coda' doesn't quite seem enough - is exquisite.

I doubt they intended this, but the second verse sounds like a tour of Mediterranean resorts - there's a Greek feel for a line, then an italo piano bar bit, then they sound like they might be about to launch into a Spanish chanson, then the piano bar again. If Moroder had spent his youth pleasing tourists in Rhodes and Rimini, rather than in Tirolean discotheques, then Giorgio By Moroder might've come out like this.

This song has always bored me, and it still does.

If Springsteen wanted reverb in the '70s, he should have travelled west and recorded at Gold Star or the Capitol Tower (if they'd let him in). Best echo chambers that ever were.

Best part of this song: That devil guitar riff that lifts its head up around 3:20 after "Where you been lately?"

Also, again, Randy's got nothing to be ashamed of.

Throw him a bone! (sorry)

This is another one of my favorites. Frey gives a perfect, naive vocal for the song, inhabiting it in way Henley could never fully commit. The nearly subliminal latin elements are a nice unexpected touch (have the Mavericks ever tried this song for their own?), and sort of a hallmark for Souther at that time. Henley, in a franker mood than when quoted below, has said that the track more or less a Souther solo comp that he and Frey added a tiny amount to and got credit. Overall this is like the perfect "El Lay" record, and perhaps ironically, the closet they got to being in the Rumours (which came out a month or so after Hotel California) wheelhouse.

The Crowe on this one is kinda boring.

NEW KID IN TOWN
GLENN: We won a Grammy® for Best Vocal Arrangement for “New Kid In Town.” I’m quite proud of that.

DON: J.D. Souther started the song. It’s about the fleeting, fickle nature of love and romance. It’s also about the fleeting nature of fame, especially in the music business. We were already chronicling our own demise [laughs]. We were basically saying, “Look, we know we’re red hot now, but we also know that somebody’s going to come along and replace us — both in music and in love.” We were always doing that double entendre thing, between the music business and personal relationships. But that song was J.D.’s baby — he was the father of that song.

May I submit Bill Janovitz's song review from the amg?

For a while the Eagles could get no respect from rock & roll hipsters; the form of country-rock they practiced was just too smooth and polished when compared to the genre's edgier and more soulful pioneers: the Byrds, Graham Parsons, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The awful, oxymoronic term "soft rock" was practically invented for the Eagles. But with the focus of the alt-country scene of the late '90s and its hip progeny such as the Scud Mountain Boys, perhaps the Eagles gained a newfound admiration. "New Kid in Town" is just about a perfect pop song. It has all the elements: about five separate melody hooks; impeccable harmonies; well-played parts; a nice Latin-flavored groove; a tension-building bridge that leads into a glorious modulation; and an outro-vamp with overlapping hooks and minor grace chords. In addition to the Eagles' Glenn Frey and Don Henley, it was co-written with J.D. Souther, another songwriter and practitioner of the Southern California sound. If there was such a thing as a Los Angeles sound and recording ethic, the lush but uncomplicated production of "New Kid in Town" embodies it in a single song. And the record on which it first appeared -- the multi-platinum Hotel California(1976), producer: Bill Szymczyk -- is a logical extension of the attention to craft, arrangement, and embrace of technology practiced in the '60s by Phil Spector in his Gold Star studios and the groundbreaking work of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. OK, well, the lyrics don't really say anything new -- mostly clichés like "there's talk on the street" and "everybody loves you, so don't let them down," and there is still something else missing. Those Wilson compositions, as smooth as they sounded, have a depth (at times cavernous) that the smooth harmonies simply can not gloss over. And the "wall of sound" that Spector was famous for still had an underlying edge and a raw power. Comparatively, "New Kid in Town" is just ear candy.

pplains otm re: devil riff.

i sort of get what the lyrics are trying to say, but i'm not sure they quite say it. i mean, i guess he's the new kid but he isn't always gonna be the new kid, boohoo. it might work better with some kind of story attached, or some kind of detail, or some kind of something, anything, to hold on to.

but musically, this is fantastic songcraft. the two key changes (from E to G and then back to E) are both surprising and both beautifully executed, not at all gratuitous. they threaten a third modulation in the middle of the coda, with the beatle-esque A/Am change at 4:03, but they don't do it; instead they stay in E and launch into a second, better coda ("everybody's talkin' bout the new kid in town/everybody's walkin' like the new kid in town..."). too long? not at all. i wish it went on longer. the tex-mex underpinning that someone pointed out above works really well on the verses.

and it's my favorite frey vocal, by far. he's letting some vulnerability in here, and it really really helps his voice. it's just so musical. is this really his only vocal on the album? that's too bad.

also: they really, really stacked the hits at the top of this album.

(speaking of something, anything, that first key change reminds me of todd rundgren for some reason.)

not really feeling the verses to "New Kid in Town"...reminds me of Jimmy Buffet.

how good would it be if they would have held it off the last album and followed up "Hotel California" with "One of These Nights"?

the beatle-esque A/Am change at 4:03

I love the guitar riff under this change, too.

how good would it be if they would have held it off the last album and followed up "Hotel California" with "One of These Nights"?

I'm feeling this!

will watch the Frey episode of "Miami Vice" called "Smuggler's Blues." Will report.

re "New Kid in Town" he does a bit like Souther.

Nice electric piano by Walsh on this one. I also love the modulation and the third chorus, where Felder steps on the overdrive pedal and transforms the song from AM pop to FM AOR, effectively bridging the pre- and post-Greatest Hits eras of the band. As for the lyrics, who gives a shit? Except maybe on the Long Run, where they finally start to make their cynicism signify, these guys are so much better if you hear them as essentially content-free, which they often are.

I am finally sitting down to listen to this after a long day and initially it sounds like computer generated 70s music. Take a laid back beat, some groovy guitars, some harmonies. some cliches, stir, profit.

The lyrics matter because if you imagine the lyrics to "A Song for You" to this music it sounds like a zillion times better. I don't love this sound enough to choose to listen to it without some emotional investment (even if it's nostalgia or imaginary romance or whatever -- anything but "johnny come lately/the new kid in town") Bleh.

everyone's talking about haim and on this thread or the other eagles thread i mention how much i love the heartache tonight beat and wish people would use it but i don't think i meant in the way that haim use it:

http://youtu.be/1TffpkE2GU4

omg playing hotel california in this bar and plus it was part of a trivia night question!

What year was the spirit last seen in the hotel Cali ?

NINETEEN SIXTY NINE

2004

Everyone got it lol

i smell skunk. there's probably one outside right now.

but 1969 is not an actual year. it's a metaphor. good thing don henley wasn't in the bar or there might've been trouble.

also, I hope the trivia contest prize involved chugging.

you know the only thing that would have made that Crowe question better is if Henley had pitched a fit, screamed THIS INTERVIEW IS OVER, flipped the table and stormed out.