About The Song
Glenn Frey never wanted to release “The Best of My Love” as a single.
The Eagles had split with producer Glyn Johns in the midst of recording 1974’s On the Border at London’s Olympic Sound because they wanted to move in a more rock-focused direction. “We’re taking a beating opening for Jethro Tull,” Frey said in 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, “and our feeling was, ‘We gotta have some kick-ass songs.'”
The Eagles and new producer Bill Szymczyk shifted to the Record Plant in Los Angeles then added guitarist Don Felder, who brought an edge to still-developing songs like “Already Gone.” “The great thing for me about [“Already Gone”] is that I left England behind,” Frey told Cameron Crowe, “and had a much more positive energy in the studio.”
But the Eagles couldn’t shake their previous sound, or fan expectations, so easily: “The Best of My Love,” a country-inflected ballad from their initial sessions with Johns, became the band’s first chart-topping hit, anyway.
Ironically, they struggled mightily while trying to piece together this easy-going song.
“I was playing acoustic guitar one afternoon in Laurel Canyon,” Frey told Crowe, “and I was trying to figure out a tuning that [then-girlfriend] Joni Mitchell had shown me a couple of days earlier. I got lost and ended up with the guitar tuning for what would later turn out to be ‘The Best of My Love.'”
Then, they simply got stuck. The band ended up reaching out to J.D. Souther, who’d recently collaborated with the Eagles on the “Doolin-Dalton” sequences of 1973’s Desperado. He was hanging out half a world away, at producer Peter Asher’s house in L.A., when Don Henley phoned from London with an urgent plea: “Can you get on a plane? We need a bridge.”
Souther flew to Olympic Sound the next day, and “The Best of My Love” – a sad lament about love’s passing released on Nov. 5, 1974 – was finally complete.
“J.D. Souther wrote the bridge. And it was perfect,” Henley told Crowe. “That was the period when there were all these great-looking girls who didn’t really want to have anything to do with us. We were just scruffy new kids who had no calling card. We could be cocky at times — which was really just a front — but we weren’t very sophisticated or confident. We were typical, frustrated young men.”
Frey wasn’t the only one who questioned whether “The Best of My Love” would work on the radio. “Someone at [the Eagles’ label] Asylum told us it could never be a single – too long, too slow, steel guitar, not enough drums,” Souther later told Rolling Stone.
Then a Michigan DJ began playing it, and “The Best of My Love” started moving up the charts. By March 1, 1975, the Eagles were at No. 1. “People requested it, and there you go,” Souther added.
No, it wasn’t a rocker – not with those quiet murmurings throughout from Bernie Leadon’s pedal steel. Instead, as Souther rightly noted, “it’s a pretty song that feels true.” That was enough to push the Eagles to unprecedented Billboard heights – whether they liked it or not.
Video
Lyrics
Every night I’m lyin’ in bed
Holdin’ you close in my dreams
Thinkin’ about all the things that we said
And comin’ apart at the seams
We try to talk it over
But the words come out to rough
I know you were tryin’
to give me the best of your loveBeautiful faces and loud, empty places
Look at the way that we live
Wastin’ our time on cheap talk and wine
Left us so little to give
That same old crowd
Was like a cold dark cloud
That we could never rise above
But here in my heart I give you the best of my love
Oh sweet darlin’ you get the best of my love, oh
Sweet darlin’, you get the best of my loveI’m goin’ back in time
And it’s a sweet dream
It was a quiet night
And I would be all right
If i could go on sleepin’
But every mornin’
I wake up and worry
What’s gonna happen today
You see it your way
And I see it mine
But we both see it slippin’ awayYou know we always had each other baby
I guess that wasn’t enough
Oh, but here in my heart
I give you the best of my love
Oh, sweet darlin’
You get the best of my love
Oh, sweet darlin’
You get the best of my love
Every night and day,
You get the best of my love
Oh, sweet darlin’ you get the best of my love
Oh, sweet darlin’ you get the best of my love..
etc..