Little wonder they broke up after such a painful delivery.

Here's some quotes from Glenn and Don about some of the songs:

DISCO STRANGLER
GLENN: "I hate this song! I hate this album! God help me! I'm bumming!" (Rolling Stone 1979)

(The rest of these are from the liner notes of The Very Best of the Eagles)

HEARTACHE TONIGHT
GLENN: ...and then they sold 12 million records, and everything changed! As Bob Dylan said, "They deceived me into thinking I had something to protect." And that's what happened with us. We made it, and it ate us. The Long Run became, indeed, the long run. It was a difficult record to make overall, but I loved "Heartache Tonight." Whenever Bob Seger was in L.A., he always used to come over and visit me, and he'd visit Don, too, and play us stuff he was working on -- and we would do the same. I seem to remember that I had the verse thing going on for "Heartache Tonight," and I was showing it to Seger, and we were jammin' -- I think we were jammin' on electric guitars at LaFontaine -- and then he blurted out the chorus. That's how "Heartache" started. Then Bob disappeared, and J.D., Don, and I finished that song up. No heavy lyrics -- the song is more of a romp -- and that's what it was intended to be.

THE SAD CAFÉ
GLENN: The title comes from the book by Carson McCullers. I love the title, which didn't have anything to do with the song, other than it was a great title. The line that really resonates for me in that song is "I don't know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free." There were so many of us aspiring musicians hanging around at the Troubadour. Some nights when Doug Dillard got drunk enough, and Gene Clark got drunk enough, and Harry Dean Stanton got drunk enough... near closing time... they would all start singing. There would be these unbelievable impromptu versions of "Amazing Grace" -- all sorts of Ozark spiritual things with the whole bar singing... That stuff never really happened. We were getting older (when we wrote the song), and there was a sadness because we had seen, close-up, that everybody's dreams don't come true. Or, at least, not in the way they think they're gonna come true.
DON: A train used to run down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard, right outside the Troubadour. Steve Martin actually had a routine where he'd get the entire audience to exit the club, hop a flatcar on that slow-moving train and ride up to La Cienega, a few blocks east. Then, everybody would hop off and walk back down to the club together. I don't think that happened very many times -- maybe not even more than once or twice, because the railroad people didn't like it. It was kind of dangerous and there was liability involved. Still -- and I don't want to over-mythologize -- it was something to remember. That was a wonderful time in Los Angeles. The city was alive with magic and a sense of possibility. People were warmer and more open than they are now.
Then, of course, there was the dark side. Friends and acquaintances of ours (from that era) had begun to meet untimely ends -- classic cases of "too much, too soon." It was either that or "too little, too late." So we were struggling to make sense of that dichotomy, that contradiction. Is fortune a good thing or a bad thing, you know? Is being fortunate, before you're ready to accept it and deal with it, actually fortunate -- or is it unfortunate? We were struggling with our own success -- riddled with feelings of guilt and unworthiness. I think a lot of young artists feel that way. We always identified with that great song "Fakin' It," by Paul Simon. It takes many years and lots of experience for a man to get comfortable in his own skin. But the Troubadour, Dan Tana's restaurant, the train -- all those things served as a great metaphor for the search, the journey that so many of us were on.

I CAN'T TELL YOU WHY
DON: Timothy came in with the title and other bits and pieces. Glenn and I just wanted to surround it with everything we could. Glenn came up with that wonderful counterpart, very much a soul-record type thing, "Try to keep your head, little girl." Glenn also composed and played that great guitar solo.
GLENN: Timothy joined the band and the real challenge, as Don and I saw it, was to get a piece of material for him that wasn't country. So we got him over to LaFontaine, and the three of us got down to work. I said, "You could sing like Smokey Robinson. Let's not do a Richie Furay, Poco-sounding song. Let's do an R&B song." He said, "Sure, love to try!" Some of those crazy moments happen when you just go over to the piano and jam. There I was, brave as a Budweiser, going right to the piano and saying, "Well, how 'bout something like this?" That's another one of my absolute favorite Eagles songs. It's got the mood. It's got the "Ooh baby, baby" vocal. But, again, counterpoint -- with Don and I singing against he melody and the understated, brilliant guitar stylings of yours truly [laughs]. It's another song that people love in our live show. Since it is a ballad, we are not playing too loud and can hear the audience. Timothy starts, and there are thousands of people singing, "Look at us, baby..."

THE LONG RUN
GLENN: We'd had the idea for about six or seven years. The title of the song was apropos, and it seemed to be a good title for the album -- let's see who'll last. I think it was a lot about longevity, and it was also about me just lovin' Tyrone Davis' record "Turning Point." We had done some slicker production like the Philly sound, but "Long Run" was more like a tribute to Memphis with the slide guitars playing the parts of the horns.
DON: It was a long and difficult album. Everything was catching up to us. Too much pressure, too much worry, too much traveling, too many controlled substances, too much paranoia and infighting. I missed having a normal life. Glenn and I were starting to grow distant. Everything was pulling apart -- and we were writing about longevity. [thoughtful pause] Yeah, well, even if we weren't living it, we were always able to idealize it in a song about the way we'd like to be -- the way we'd like to be perceived. That song may have been a message to our critics. It may have been a message from Glenn to me or me to Glenn. It could be taken all kinds of different ways. Could be a message to a girl -- a long-departed lover. But, again, it was built on that foundation of Glenn's rhythm guitar playing [sings part]. Always that foundation. So, here we are some 25 years later -- 32 years total -- still going strong. The Long Run, indeed.

IN THE CITY
GLENN: Of all the songs we were considering for the album, I always loved this one of Joe's. An earlier solo version had been in the movie The Warriors, but it wasn't that widely known. I always liked the song and thought it could have been an Eagles record, and so we decided to make it one.

THOSE SHOES
DON: One of my favorites. At that time, all the girls were wearing Charles Jourdan shows -- the ones with the little ankle straps. They'd become very popular and we were big fans [laughs]. And so, we said, "Well, it's not enough just to write about that; we have to turn it into a metaphor for women standing on their own two feet, so to speak, and taking responsibility for their own lives, their own losses." That was our intent. The lyric "Once you've started wearing those shoes" meant "Once you've started being your own woman and taking responsibility for your own life; once you've decided not to be just decoration -- an appendage to some guy -- then this is all the crap you're going to have to put up with in conjunction with that." Anyone who decided to become the master of his or her own destiny always has to put up with a lot of crap. On the surface the song was about the singles scene: the beautiful, young women seemingly unaware of the sharks waiting in the shallows... sharks that sometimes included us. It was also a great, great beat. It gave Felder a chance to strap on the talkbox, a device which Joe Walsh pioneered on "Rocky Mountain Way" -- and the two of them soloed together...
GLENN: As far as I know, it's the only double-talkbox solo in existence. That's Felder and Walsh on talkbox at the end singing "Butt out...butt out...."