The Eagles
Their Greatest Hits, 1972-75

THE REVIEW

On DeBaser, there are almost thirteen thousand reviews, and yet the most obvious one is still missing: the album depicted here is simply the best-selling of all time, of all music, of the entire world!
It is about to reach the thirtieth platinum disc (thirty million copies) after finally surpassing "Thriller," currently at 27 million and for many years in pole position but has long been falling short due to Michael Jackson's definitive moral and media collapse.

The sales of an album should not influence one's personal judgment, true, but this sales champion cannot be dismissed by anyone with a mere shrug: to reach such an absolute level, one must evidently touch many, all the universal chords, creating something that combines quality with lightness, charm with simplicity, passion with cunning.
And so, as a great admirer of the early Eagles, the more genuine ones of the first three or four albums, I cannot understand the enormous success of this music project that draws the obvious from those albums, that is, the tracks released as singles (and mind you, no "Hotel California," which would be released a few months later).

The astonishing thing is that three of the four albums from which this compilation was drawn had modest followings; in other words, most of the "singles" that form this "Greatest Hits Compilation" were not hits at the time... so they became real effective hits by being on this collection and not before! The union has made the strength, in short. Songs that couldn't make it on their own have found themselves in Olympus. Let's see which ones they are:

From the first album "Eagles" from 1972, we have "Take It Easy," undoubtedly the best, a perfect electroacoustic ballad on the road, rolling and brilliant in its choruses and lyrics, a great calling card for the group who rightly put it at the opening of the album. At the time, it briefly entered the American Top Thirty only to exit immediately, oh well, the first single... Then there is "Witchy Woman," the debut of drummer Don Henley on lead vocals, a rock with a tribal feel, nothing special, no trace in the singles charts at the time. Also from the first album, "Peaceful Easy Feeling," truly a favorite of guitarist Glenn Frey who sings it, but its composer Jack Temchin is an external friend of the group: an enveloping and mellow country rock ballad, with no impact at its release.

From the fantastic "Desperado" second album of 1973 comes the classic duo "Tequila Sunrise" and "Desperado" (one after the other on the original album): two ballads, the first acoustic, the second pianistic, two pearls that at the time went mostly unnoticed. From the third album of 1974 "On The Border," there is the first single "Already Gone," an "Eagles-like" rock, that is, decent, nice but harmless, and the infamous "The Best Of My Love," one of the less interesting ballads of their production, but which instead began their immense fortune as the third (sic) single from the album.

From the fourth and last (up to that moment) "One Of These Nights" of 1975, this immediately a successful album, the eponymous song another slightly reggae and very cunning rock, as well as the statuesque "Lyin' Eyes," a perfect country rock ballad full of flavor and merit, and finally the last slow "Take It To The Limit", this time very soul but not unsuccessful because bassist Randy Meisner sings it like a god (it's his) with a stentorian and heartfelt voice, on tones more than tenor, unattainable by the vast majority of male singers.

Therefore, the best-selling album of all time is a collection of singles mostly not hits, taken from records mostly of modest, decent, non-transcendental success...

The world is strange, sometimes.