Long Road Out of Eden

This 10-minute opus is the title track to the Eagles Long Road Out Of Eden album, which was a long time coming - released in 2007 it was their first studio album since 1979. The song was written by group members Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Timothy B. Schmit, with Henley writing the lyric and doing the lead vocal. At the time, America was entrenched in seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Henley felt were counterproductive. In this song, he uses biblical references to describe the folly of American foreign policy under the leadership of George W. Bush. The road out of Eden seemed long, and he didn't like where it was headed.

Much of this song deals with the way information was disseminated in modern times. Breathless cable news anchors and clickbait internet stories had taken the place of nuanced coverage, and more than ever it was driven by moneyed interests. Henley sings: Weavin' down the American highway Through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda Now we're drivin' dazed and drunk He told Billboard: "I was originally going to write 'weaving down the information highway' because I get on my computer every day and there is so much crap on the Internet. It's such a big waste of time if you aren't careful. There are wonderful things on there, too - it's such a resource of knowledge and information. But, just like television, the Internet has a lot of useless crap going on. In the end I decided that it wouldn't make a lot of sense with the rest of the song just to suddenly go over and start talking about computers and the Internet. So I changed it back to American highway just to make it broader in scope. I think with the words 'cultural junk' I got my point across. I think we've cornered the market on cultural junk, pretty much."

Henley, Frey and Schmit started writing this song in 2001, but putting together an Eagles song is a very slow-moving process. By 2003, they had a song with a similar sentiment called "Hole In The World" ready, which they released as a single and included on their compilation The Very Best Of The Eagles. Frey and Henley got the songs "Busy Being Fabulous " and "Fast Company" finished, but "Long Road Out Of Eden" took longer because was 10-minutes long and Henley considered the lyric carefully. Finally, inspiration hit and he delivered the lyric. The album didn't appear until 2007 but was a double-disc set with 20 songs. They released it on their own label and sold it (at first) exclusively at Walmart for the low-low price of $11.88, which still let them pocket about $4 per unit because they cut out the record company. With 7 million copies sold, it was a nice payday and a great lead-up to their subsequent tour.