Already Gone - 2013 Remaster

In this song, a guy hears through the grapevine that his girl is going to leave him, but he cries no tears because he's already gone, checked out with a new sense of freedom. She'll have to eat her lunch all by herself from now on.

"Already Gone" is one of the few Eagles songs not written by any member of the band. It was written by the songwriters Jack Tempchin and Robb Strandlund about five years before the Eagles recorded it. Around 1968, Tempchin was managing a club called The Back Door at San Diego State College (which later became San Diego State University). The club was a showcase for folk music, and Tempchin and Strandlund often performed there together. When he appeared on the Songfacts Podcast, Tempchin told the story: "We were playing one night and we were in the back room, which was the kitchen where there were these big refrigerator doors. I opened the door and there was a white jug. So I got this jug out, and for some reason, we thought it would be OK to just drink out of this jug. It was hard cider, and I had never had any alcohol or any drugs or anything at that point. So, we were drinking out of this jug and we started to feel really good, and I said, 'Let's write a country song.' So in about 20 minutes in the back room there, we wrote 'Already Gone.' The chorus goes woo hoo hoo because I just felt so good suddenly."

The song found its way to the Eagles via Glenn Frey, who was good friends with Jack Tempchin - they met in San Diego in the late '60s. Tempchin performed the song himself from time to time, but didn't think much of it until years later when he got a call from Frey, who was in the studio working on the third Eagles album, On The Border. "He says, 'Do you know that country song you wrote? I think that'd be a good rock song,'" Tempchin told Songfacts. "Then he held up the phone to the speakers in the studio and there was their version of 'Already Gone.'"