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Eagles · S2 E2
Take It Easy
Jackson Browne starts the song, Glenn Frey finishes it. A window-down, highway anthem that becomes their calling card overnight
Echo Park, Los Angeles, early 1972. Glenn Frey has been listening to Jackson Browne struggle with the same unfinished melody through the ceiling for weeks, and one morning he walks upstairs and says: let me finish it.
Eagles, Take It Easy (1972). The debut single that introduced the world to Eagles. Glenn Frey sings lead over a driving acoustic groove and four-part harmonies that make the whole thing sound effortless. The song Jackson Browne started and Glenn Frey finished, and the calling card of California country-rock.
Take It Easy, Eagles (1972)
The song opens with a bright acoustic guitar riff, immediately recognizable. Listen for the way the rhythm section pushes harder than anything else on the Laurel Canyon scene: Glenn Frey's Detroit upbringing showing through the California veneer. The chorus stacks four voices in harmony, and Glyn Johns captures it all in a single live take. What makes "Take It Easy" work is the tension between its laid-back lyrics and its relentless forward motion.
Winslow, Arizona
The small town on Route 66 that Glenn Frey put on the map with a single lyric. In 1999, Winslow opened "Standin' on the Corner" Park at the intersection of Route 66 and Kinsley Avenue, complete with a bronze statue, a trompe l'oeil mural, and a Route 66 marker. The park draws tens of thousands of visitors each year to a town that was otherwise disappearing.
Who co-wrote "Take It Easy" with Glenn Frey?
Take It Easy: The Numbers
Rock Me on the Water, Jackson Browne (Jackson Browne, 1972)
While Eagles were turning "Take It Easy" into a hit, Browne was releasing his own debut on the same label. This gospel-tinged plea for redemption shows the other side of the songwriter Glenn Frey heard through the apartment floor. Where "Take It Easy" drives forward, this song floats. Both came from the same mind, the same year, the same Asylum Records catalog.
The debut single is a hit, but Don Henley has his own song brewing. He and Bernie Leadon have been writing about Zelda Fitzgerald, dark magic, and the sinister side of the California dream.
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