First but not necessarily foremost, fuck the Eagles. No other American act has been so responsible for the corrosive idea of rock bands as permanent brands, or as outlets for making so much money from selling so much stuff that they are simply too big to stop, no matter what senescence or death itself has to say about the subject.

Summaries of their sins and absurdities have now filled several books, but a sampler is instructive. First up, in 1971, Don Henley and Glenn Frey—brothers-in-opportunism-to-be for nearly the next half-century—bailed on their boss Linda Ronstadt to barge into the office of emerging mogul David Geffen, asking for a deal though they didn’t yet have a real band. Geffen said yes. Two years later, as massive success seemed like the Eagles’ manifest destiny, that tandem cut their bandmates out of a publishing deal, setting themselves up with a never-ending sinecure but setting their original quartet up to crumble.

Henley and Frey then spent the next several decades treating members like seasonal tires, swapping them out as external conditions dictated and suing former bandmates they thought wronged them. In fact, though Frey died more than a decade ago now, the Eagles recently extended their farewell tour into 2027, turning what they dubbed the “Long Goodbye” in 2023 into a seemingly permanent sleepover at Sphere. Henley has called Frank Ocean “a talentless little prick” for sampling “Hotel California,” bribed L.A. bookstores not to host readings of Eagles biographies, sued a clothing brand for using the phrase “Don a Henley and Take It Easy” (a reference to a song he didn’t even write), and recently admitted he once hired a 16-year-old sex worker after the band’s 1980 breakup because he needed to forget his sad rock-star feelings. Rock’n’roll is a pantheon of detestable heroes; like the country whose patriotic bird they borrowed for a name, however, the Eagles love to ask, “Can you hate me just a little bit harder?”

And yet, Americans en masse, including me, love the Eagles, or at least about two dozen of their songs. In January 2026, the band’s first compilation—Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975), a 10-track treasure trove released almost exactly 50 years earlier—became the first quadruple-diamond album, making it the most popular record ever in the United States. Combine 1989, Take Care, and Abbey Road, and, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, they don’t yet collectively outstrip this single Eagles set.

The reasons for those outsized numbers range from the obvious to the rather involved. The 10 cuts on Their Greatest Hits are, after all, an unimpeachable commercial distillation of folk-rock and California dreams, the global convulsions of the ’60s turned into 43 minutes of noncontroversial background hits that share a surprising and understated thematic depth. It is country-soul and country-rock and folk-rock that have been part of the very American air for more than half a century. Whether or not you like them, these songs are so well-designed for mass consumption that to hear “Take It Easy” or “Tequila Sunrise” once or twice is to know them forever.

But before streaming made separating singles wheat from album chaff almost free and very easy, greatest-hits compendiums were ubiquitous, a way for the industry to turn early investment into real profit. So, why was this the smash? Despite all of their self-satisfied behavior and creative complacency in the last 45 years, the Eagles first wrote convincingly and sang exquisitely of permanent restlessness, of never having what you need or want, of always craving something more than what you’ve got, no matter the personal cost or collateral damage of the quest to get it. Written and rendered by dudes who longed for unlimited success, these are songs about cheating and being cheated on and trying but failing to be content, or love as lived amid capitalist indulgence. Neil Young once damned the Eagles with the faint praise of saying they were the one band to “perfectly captur[e] the feel of L.A.,” a city he excoriated just as the Eagles were becoming enormous. Fifty years on, these songs capture the feelings and failures not of Los Angeles but of America, too.

If you are only passingly familiar or entirely dismissive of the Eagles, you probably have at least heard that they are posers, a supergroup manufactured in the ’70s to capitalize on the rather insolvent innovations of the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and even the Band in the previous decade. But this is largely a myth, concocted by critics and cool kids to explain away and undercut the popularity of their music. A recent Dartmouth College graduate, Robert Christgau, wrote that the stuff of their debut was “suave and synthetic—brilliant, but false.”

This is a story that deserves to die. Henley was raised in a tiny Texas town bound by bayou and pine, the same place that produced Scott Joplin and T-Bone Walker. Frey grew up near Detroit, a comfortably middle-class kid obsessed with Jack Kerouac and his city’s soul hit factory. Bassist Randy Meisner was a Nebraska farm guy, raised in the shadow of prominent sandstone bluffs that guided dreamy Americans westward in the 19th century. Bernie Leadon left Minneapolis for San Diego when he was 10, joining a bluegrass band there as a teenager; that choice eventually led the astounding multi-instrumentalist to Dillard & Clark, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the band that finally turned those sounds into a windfall: the Eagles. Guitarist Don Felder, who joined in time for half of the tracks on Their Greatest Hits, was a Gainesville guy who mentored Tom Petty either on guitar or piano, depending on which of them you asked.

So if we are going to call the Eagles fake, false, or phony when it comes to being foundational to country-rock or musical concepts of Americana, the same goes for Gram Parsons (Florida trust-fund baby), Neil Young (rebellious and sensitive son of a Canadian journalist), and, yet again, the Band (four Canadians who repeatedly found out they could not really work without their Arkansas drummer). I don’t mean to discount Young, Parsons, or the Band—all of whom made more distinct and complicated albums than the Eagles ever dared; I just mean to defend the Eagles from specious claims that they somehow had less right to these sounds. Questions of authenticity almost always stem from notions of gatekeeping. With the Eagles, they were attempts to bar the door to a club that felt too good for them, to keep, as Frey would soon sing, “the new kid in town” outside.

The Eagles were, however, baldly ambitious from the start, a band that formed with the express mission of writing hits, getting famous, getting laid, getting rich. Or, as Frey told Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone in 1975, “Everybody had to look good, sing good, play good and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect. AM and FM success. Number 1 singles and albums, great music and a lot of money.” Henley echoed him: “Money was a much saner goal than adoration.”

Image was essential. Geffen gave them a record deal without actually hearing them, then exiled them to extended residencies in little Colorado clubs so they could become a band before they attempted their California splashdown. Wanting to create cash cows, Geffen flew Glyn Johns—the hotshot British producer and engineer who had just worked on Sticky Fingers, Stage Fright, Who’s Next, and a half-dozen other canonical records—to Colorado to watch the upstarts bludgeon Chuck Berry tunes. He wasn’t in until he heard them sing Frey’s cheesy little ballad, “Most of Us Are Sad.” Never mind the song, though, because there were people who could write better ones for or with the Eagles: Those harmonies could not only make the Eagles good but also make them rich.

Johns was, of course, right. More than country-rock or blue-eyed soul, the connective musical tissue of Their Greatest Hits is the effortless way the four original Eagles sing with one another, the way they take a decent-enough chorus or verse and instantly make it pop, like a kaleidoscopic flower blooming atop an ordinary stem. Notice how Henley’s warm tenor pushes against the rest of the band’s falsetto strain during “One of These Nights” or how Frey’s best Southern-boy approximation during “Peaceful Easy Feeling” glides in and out of the harmonies that surround him, so fluid and full I sometimes forget he’s even singing lead. That Johns spotted this—and helped the Eagles ace it across their first two albums and part of a third—doesn’t make them posers; it simply makes Johns one of the most intuitive producers in rock history.

“Take It Easy”—the first single from the first Eagles album and opener of Their Greatest Hits—is a song the band barely wrote. When Frey was in a terribly named but rather fun group called Longbranch Pennywhistle, he and his bandmate, the noted cad and great songwriter J.D. Souther, moved into a cheap Echo Park apartment with Jackson Browne. Frey was the baby of the bunch, but Browne had experience the older Souther could only imagine. He had lived in New York, dated Nico, and written and played all over her Chelsea Girl while still a teenager. He didn’t have a deal yet, but he was a devoted songwriter, rising early to work at the piano each morning. Sound wafting through the floorboards, Frey took note of the effort. Frey eventually helped Browne finish “Take It Easy,” adding the crucial details about what exactly happened in Winslow, Arizona, out on Route 66. Neither Henley nor Frey were expert songwriters when the Eagles soon began; as with Johns and those harmonies, they were learning from the best.

This helps explain the potency of Their Greatest Hits, too. Heard beginning to end, the first four Eagles albums are suffer-fests, capturing the band as they learn not only to write but also to tell bad from good. They released four albums, or 40 songs, in their first three years, and the great majority of them simply fill space. “Most of Us Are Sad,” “Early Bird,” “My Man,” “After the Thrill Is Gone”: Henley and Frey loved to talk about their quality control, how hard they worked to find le mot juste, but I’ve never heard those records as much more than real-time chronicles of success and failure, the sound of a band still figuring out how to not suck.

Henley hated the idea of a greatest hits collection, because he claimed it was “the forced and hideous marriage of art and commerce,” ostensibly back when he claimed to care about that first part. He failed to understand, though, that Their Greatest Hits stripped away the misfires of the Eagles’ actual albums, leaving only 10 of the best songs they would ever write, that have ever been written in the realm of folk-rock. Their Greatest Hits is the only no-skips set in the catalog of a band that sometimes seemed to specialize in the skips. Put another way, I will always own a copy of Their Greatest Hits; I would not take copies of the first four Eagles albums from a free bin, Desperado debatably excepted.

In March 2026, writing about the golden anniversary of Their Greatest Hits, the BBC asked British music journalist Peter Doggett why these 10 songs sold so well. He said, “It’s very melodic, very professional and doesn’t actually mean anything.” This is a well-earned insult for a band who once insisted that “On the Border”—a song about being annoyed at a traffic cop—was some profound political statement.

Still, these are not songs about nothing. Nine of the 10 tracks on Their Greatest Hits—with the lone exception of “Witchy Woman,” Henley’s bout of strong-woman paranoia—are about wanting something you do not have and the anguish you can endure to get it. “Take It Easy” is often taken at face value. Frey, though, is a worried man here, singing for his salvation, trying to find that one lover who will fix him. Listen for Leadon’s simple but brilliant banjo line, which begins as he takes his guitar solo and does not disappear until the track is done; it’s the sound of anxiety and self-doubt, of trying to loosen your load, not of simple contentment. The title and chorus of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” are, likewise, feints; this lust sure feels nice, but Frey understands that it will likely end in another rejection. That’s OK, because he’s already too low to be let down again.

Then there are the affair-and-breakup songs, tunes where someone is searching for something better, like young musicians heading west to get famous. “Lyin’ Eyes” sounds dreamy but reads cruelly, chronicling a kept woman who prowls each night to the “cheating side of town” only to come back home and deplore the person she reckons she must have always been. No one in this love triangle is happy or satisfied. The same goes for “Tequila Sunrise,” a brutal song about betrayal and trying to fill your own permanent emotional void no matter who you hurt in the process. “Dealin’ friends,” as Frey sings, may feel awful, but does it really matter when the upshot feels better?

“Already Gone” is a kiss-off about breaking someone before they can break you first, “One of These Nights” about fooling yourself into a state of eternal hope, about blindly believing that it is always the eve of your redemption. “Every morning, I wake up and worry/What’s going to happen today?” Henley sings near the end of Their Greatest Hits. However soft and nice they may sound, however well those harmonies hold together, these are not songs of swagger or certainty.

This restive edge showed up as a guiding principle on the Eagles’ full-length records, at least temporarily. By the time they began recording their second album early in 1973, three songs from their debut had neared or broken into the Billboard Top 10, with “Best of My Love” expertly peaking just as they prepared to release the follow-up, Desperado. Despite their unapologetic enthusiasm for fame, they wanted to take a chance as artists, too, making a quasi-concept album about Western outlaws inspired by their year grinding on the road. It was a cocky wager: The album never entered the Top 50 and rode relatively few airwaves.

It was, however, the best album of the first portion of their career, producing the song that still rivals “Hotel California” as their real landmark—the centerpiece of Their Greatest Hits, “Desperado.” The first co-write between Henley and Frey was a bona fide cowboy ballad if cowboys kept grand pianos around campfires. It’s Henley’s wise but weary note to self, his plea to settle down before he becomes a rock’n’roll casualty like Jimi or Janis or all the rest. (Parsons and Clarence White, the colossal guitarist who joined the Byrds after he left, would die just months after its release. “Desperado” felt prescient, still somehow does.)

Stepping from behind the drums for the first two minutes, Henley reaches a new level as a lead singer, his voice pulling away from the piano in long and gliding lines, as if he’s searching for satisfaction he knows he may never find. “Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talking/Your prison is walking through this world all alone,” he sings during the song’s best line, the kind of quip that may come to you after one too many nights of living as a lothario on the road. It’s hard not to hear it now and think about what the Eagles became, how the band morphed into the thing you keep doing when all your friends are dead or otherwise gone, because that’s just your particular business of rock’n’roll.

The original members of the Eagles had crawled from the countercultural shudders of the ’60s, slightly too young to have really been there for the Summer of Love or Woodstock or the violent quakes of Altamont, the Manson murders, and the Zodiac Killer. They massaged those early ragged country-rock sounds and free-love ideals into something smoother and more accessible, something that felt slightly titillating but never actually dangerous. In 1981, Gay Talese published Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his hit account of the country’s sexual revolution across the prior two decades. These songs felt a little like that—a way to peer into other people’s affairs, knowing just enough to feel the illicit thrill of some faraway tryst. Buying Their Greatest Hits for the hi-fi at home wasn’t adventure, adultery, or escape itself, but it at least suggested all of that, the way a pine candle can conjure Christmas in July. With its safe whiff of danger, it was a perfect product for a country that had finally found its way out of Vietnam.

The release of Their Greatest Hits, in February 1976, marked the end of the Eagles’ relative innocence, and the beginning of an era where they became the obdurate opportunists that they remain. Crowded by the addition of Felder and rankled by the band’s heavier rock pursuits, Leadon—a physical beast who had also been the folk-rock heart of so many of these songs, his touch light but pointed—dumped an entire Budweiser on Frey’s head during a heated band meeting in Cincinnati, just as he headed for his exit from the Eagles. The band had already been in talks with the more pyrotechnically minded Joe Walsh for months, slowly bringing him into the flock with a guest spot at Wembley Stadium. They announced the swap in December 1975, four months before Their Greatest Hits arrived.

Meisner wouldn’t last much longer, either. “Take It to the Limit”—another absolute anthem from Their Greatest Hits about loneliness and lust and always seeking something better—had become his signature song, the high notes in the coda suggesting he was secretly the band’s soul guy. When he refused to sing it one night, whether because he was actually sick or simply tired of the hit, he and Frey fought. Meisner was out at the end of 1977, before Hotel California was even a year old. This is another moment where the Eagles helped codify what it meant to be a rock band: crowd-pleasing entertainment at any expense—no skipping the hit one night because you felt like shit. The quartet that had walked into Geffen’s office only six years earlier was now down to two, down to that core duo who had already cut the other original bandmates out of the publishing anyway. The remaining Eagles stopped caring about the tug-of-war between art and commerce; for the next five decades, money ruled.

The spark plug of Walsh, the softness of new bassist Timothy B. Schmit, the ubiquity of Hotel California, which went on to sell 28 million copies: It all changed and scaled so fast that even Frey and Henley couldn’t last much longer. Their 1979 album, The Long Run, was a fascinating if uneven explosion of ideas, but it was such a grind to make that everyone around the band instead dubbed it “The Long One.” Frey liked to insist that “Perfection is not an accident.” He and Henley were consummate taskmasters, always trying to make the Eagles something more than they had been, the restless ethos that animated those early songs still driving the band. By the time Frey and Felder nearly came to blows backstage in the summer of 1980, however, those threads were too frayed to hold. The hit-making version of the Eagles lasted less than a decade.

But the Eagles never really went away. Just as they split, classic rock radio emerged as a new format, its popularity rising quickly as the sound of pop went electronic, as hip-hop became a global phenomenon, as grunge later came and hair metal went. The Eagles were pleasant mainstays of these channels, slipping right in alongside the bands that had inspired them and reminding listeners of a time that was slipping away. Their Greatest Hits sold two million copies between 1990 and 1993, another eight million between 1993 and 1995. When the Eagles finally returned in 1994, their MTV special didn’t feel only like a party for old dudes coming out of retirement, because they had never disappeared. Sure, Henley and Frey had solo careers, but the reach of these songs had expanded irrespective of them. Consider that Their Greatest Hits only spent five weeks atop the Billboard 200 but 544 total weeks—more than 10 years—on the chart. This long tail was a musical tether to the past amid the inevitable tumult of change.

Except for that 14-year gap, the Eagles have been a band for 55 years now. In that span, the United States has had 10 presidents, but the Eagles have released only seven studio albums, six of them during the first decade. Aside from 2007’s aptly named struggle session, Long Road Out of Eden, there have been just four other new songs during the last 30 years. If you wanted something to buy, however, there were nearly 10 Eagles compilations released in the same span, not including 1982’s Greatest Hits Volume 2, potent enough but not nearly as cohesive as its predecessor.

In those blessed early years, the Eagles wrote about moving forward, looking for something better, trying to find fulfillment however they could. But in another rock’n’roll archetype they helped perfect, they got rich and realized that they didn’t have to write anything else, that those old hits were so good that they would just keep writing new checks. Those songs are, after all, that most marvelous breed of pop—easy to love but always anxious and unsettled beneath the placid surface, their bright harmonies simply reiterating the fact that the world can be dark, even for beautiful young dudes from Southern California. That is, you could relate to the Eagles and their songs, at least until the Eagles decided they didn’t need to relate to anything at all except the status quo of their own stardom.