Eagles

By Sheryl Crow

The Eagles forever changed country and rock, but I just think of what they did as being great American music. It’s amazing how one band could take all those influences — country and rock, of course, but also soul, R&B and folk — and still sound so distinctive.

The Eagles were a real band. After an album or two, Don Henley and Glenn Frey turned into one of rock’s all-time great songwriting teams. But everyone contributed material and incredible musicianship to the effort: Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, then Don Felder, and later Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit. They started out in the age of the sensitive singer-songwriter, and their music was as smart and sensitive as anyone’s, but when they called upon it, they also had the power of a great rock & roll band.

The first song of theirs that I vividly remember hearing was “Take It Easy.” Those lyrics — by Frey and Jackson Browne — could have been from any Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson song, but the instrumentation and energy were decidedly rock. The combination sounded so powerful.

I also remember being on a long cross-country family road trip as a kid, driving across the Texas desert at night. The only radio station we could get was a scratchy AM station from who knows where. The haunting opening strains of “Hotel California” came on the radio. My father thought that all of us kids were asleep; I immediately assumed that he would shut the radio off. But he didn’t. He couldn’t resist it any more than I could.