Around the turn of the decade, the ex-Eagle—who opens for Styx and Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon’s first solo tour this weekend—opened a storage locker containing long-forgotten tapes, and decided to take them home to his studio. Once transferred to digital, Felder found sounds of the Eagles rehearsing in his Malibu studio.
Also in the heap were lost recordings that have since evolved. From the first demo he ever did for the country-rock band (which apparently, Don Henley loved) to “Move On,” which serves as the opening track and lead single for the aptly-titled The Vault.
“I took the original inspiration, like you would from a demo, and turned it into a master,’” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Before becoming one of the guys who gave us the unforgettable guitar duel that ended “Hotel California,” the 77-year-old spent a good chunk of his youth in Gainesville, where he played in bands with Stephen Stills and future fellow Eagle Bernie Leadon respectively. He even gave a kid named Tom Petty a few guitar lessons.
“You just grow up down there in the south, and little did any of us suspect that we would all go on to be platinum selling Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrities or artists,” he added. Felder didn’t forget his origin story either, as he admitted that stays as close to as people from that era as possible, even playing rounds of golf with Stills until recently.
This weekend at the ol’ Gary amphitheatre, Felder opens for Styx—which just announced its 18th studio album, Circling From Above this week—and former REO Speedwagon leader Kevin Cronin, both being names that Felder has praised for being “no drama, no divas, and no hissy fits” kinds of people.
Read our full interview with the Eagles’ Don Felder below.
Hey, Don. How are you doing today?
I’m doing great. It’s a beautiful, sunny California day here. It was supposed to be 72 degrees today. Blue skies, no rain, no fires, no craziness. Just good weather.
Nice. I’m in Florida, so I gotta tell you, I’m a little jealous.
Ha. Well, I grew up down there. You know that, right?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s just a little too hot down here.
I do love playing in Florida, no kidding. It’s one of my favorite states. I don’t know why, but maybe a lot of people that come out to these shows know me as a Gator, a Florida native, and come out and support me. So anyway, it’s just been fun to play down there.
So, anyone who has seen the show knows that it’s mostly centered around Eagles material. But are there any deep cuts that you wish were better known? Like, are there any songs you wish you could throw into your set, but deep down, you know, the crowd may not respond to it as well as some of the other hits?
Well, I think it’s difficult for a crowd to come to a show where they’re expecting to see or hear what I’m known for, or what any artist is known for, and that artist tries to play too many unknown songs. I’m going to play one new song off of The Vault, we have three singles coming out, and I’ll change that every leg so that I’ll be able to judge what the live reaction is to each song, each track that is this cut on the album. You don’t get to do that until you play it for crowds, and I’ll probably apologize for playing a new song that nobody’s heard for those first three weeks on the road, but you’ve got to start somewhere. But then, I play a lot of Eagles stuff, I play “Heavy Metal,” I play a lot of things that I would normally not do. I play “Pride and Joy,” which is a tip of the hat to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
It’s not just wall-to-wall Eagles songs, and every once in a while, I’ll throw in “Girls In Black” or some of the things from my second and third solo record, “American Rock and Roll” might pop in there for a time or two, so we’ll see. Literally, this tour is fantastic. Between myself, Kevin and REO, and Styx and Tommy Shaw, we’ve toured together and it really is a brotherly family. There’s no drama, there’s no divas, there’s no hissy fits. We just love playing music together and hanging out together. It’s like a big family, whether you’re in the cafeteria having dinner together with these guys, or on stage jamming with them, or whatever. It’s just a really great group of guys. I do a lot of Eagles hits, Kevin does a lot of REO hits, and Styx does a lot of hits, so you get four hours of really great, top quality hits by great bands.
That’s great. It sounds like an eclectic show for sure, but one deep cut that does come to mind is “Visions,” because that was the only Eagles song that you sang lead vocals on. When you recorded that, you were still pretty new to the band, so I gotta know, were you anxious to ask Don Henley and Glenn Frey if you could sing leads? Because the new kid doesn’t typically get much power with something like that so soon into his tenure.
I think what happened was in the past, before I joined the band, and it was four guys—Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner, Don and Glenn—everybody got at least two songs, and maybe Don got three, or Glenn got three, but typically, everybody got two songs. But when I joined the band, being the fifth member and coming in during On The Border, it was really important to follow up with the strongest songs and strongest recordings we could do. And that’s why I was honored that I got to take a shot at one. I don’t know if that was the absolute favorite song I would have done, but it was the only one that Don and Glenn thought I could record, and we played guitar against each other, Glenn and I, on it, and had fun doing it. So I didn’t regret doing that at all. That was a nice way to get my toe in the water. So yeah, it was an honor to be able to do that song.
You’ve also said that you had your buddy, David Sanborn in mind when you wrote the solo on “One of These Nights.” Were there any other guitar bits where you had him, or jazz in general, in mind?
Not so much jazz. It’s just that I grew up phrasing like a horn player, and horn players typically—after seeing Miles Davis live and a few other horn players— they have a way of phrasing and playing, and you have to stop and take a breath. So guitar players like to shred. You can’t remember a single guitar solo. You’ll remember who it was, with the way they shred and the tone of their guitar, but I always learn to phrase like a horn player, and it makes the most sense. Somebody said a long time ago, “if you want somebody to remember something, set it to a simple melody.”
Now, you can sing the guitar solos on “One of These Nights,” you can sing the guitar solo on “Hotel California,” you can probably sing the guitar solos on anything I played lead on in the Eagles, or my solo stuff. And here’s the reason I say that: When kids are two years old, you know, barely walking around and you know, they can learn the ABCs without even knowing what an A or a B or a C looks like. I can learn the whole alphabet from that very simple little song. So if you take that somebody of such low middle development as a two year old can learn the ABC song by making it simple enough for them…I just think my phrasing is more like a vocalist, because you’ve got to stop and take a breath and get this thing nonstop.
So yeah, I was thinking of Dave Sanborn. Dave and I were friends. He lived out in Malibu for a while, we’d go fishing and hang out – just a lovely, lovely guy and an amazing sax player. So I said, “what would Dave play on this?” If you listen to that solo, it really is an alto sax solo, so that was my thought. I never thought I’d play sax on guitar, but it came out that way!
So, let’s talk The Vault, this new album that’s a collection of mostly obscure or lost songs and demos that you just cleaned up and refurbished over the last few years. What drove you to take this project on?
Well, I had no intention of doing it. I moved out of Malibu after the fifth fire came through there. I said, “I’m getting out of here before I get burned in the ground.” So I moved into Beverly Hills, bought another house and I took my studio that was in Malibu, and I just put it all in storage until I found the house I wanted to buy. So, I had all these tapes and cassettes and all sorts of stuff in my studio, and I just literally keep the cassettes and the CDs in a big cardboard box. I had two-inch tapes that were masters I’d worked on, and one-inch 16-track recordings of the Eagles rehearsing in my studio, and just tons of stuff I had completely forgotten about. So I said, “I need to go over and see what’s in that locker. I don’t even know what’s in there. Let’s go take a look.”
I went into this locker 20 years later. I moved out in 2000, and about four or five years ago, we went into the locker, and I was looking at all my recording equipment and all my outboard gear and all that stuff. Then I saw these boxes, these tapes, and I go, “I have no idea what’s even on these tapes. I’m going to take this box back in my studio and we’ll transfer them onto digital and we’ll get to hear all these ideas.” So we did exactly that, and as some of those were going by, I was going “damn, that was a good idea, that was a great progression.” Like, there’s this one song that was just me playing electric piano. No track, no drums, no bass, no nothing. And it was the electric piano, with some progression that I just was fascinated by it. So I took that and redid it, and instead of playing it on electric piano…when I play piano, my nickname is Claw, not Fingers *laughs* so I’m not very good on keyboard.
We set it up, I did it on acoustic guitar, and I brought in great players to play with me, and it became a duet that I did with my daughter Leah, “Together Forever.” But it was just such a beautiful chord progression, and I just said, “I got to make something out of it.” So then, I had heard a couple of other things, like the very first demo that I ever made for the Eagles in 1974 or ’75. I was living in Topanga and I had a four track TEAC tape recorder, reel to reel. I had no drums. I had a bass, an electric guitar, and an acoustic guitar. So I got a cardboard box, set a mic up in front of it, and went *plays drum beat* and I played about three or four minutes worth of drum part on the cardboard box. It was my drum track. I picked up a guitar, made a rhythm progression for it, played bass on it, and then I played slide on it, because it was right after I been invited to join the band, and they liked my slide playing so much, I said, “well, I’ll write a track with slide.”
I showed it to them and they said, “that’s really great. We should call this ‘Slide On.’” Nah, I just think that’s a little corny, to tell you the truth. So it just sat there, nothing ever happened to it. But I love the slide parts that I’d written in ’74, ’75 and it became “Move On,” the number one track coming off this CD. And it was just hearing things that I had done that I’d completely forgotten about. I have digital audio files on hard drives, some of them have three, four terabytes worth of stuff on it, and just demos, ideas, sketches, thumbnails. I’d start off with something and I’d go, “okay, that’s all right. Let’s move on to something else.” So I accumulate these things, and then when I saw those, and heard some of the tracks on that, I said “dad gum, I should finish these things. That’s a great idea.” And I did exactly that, from the ground up. I just took the original inspiration, like you would from a demo, and turned it into a master.
It’s also pretty sweet that you’ve got most of Toto on the album, but there was one song I definitely wanted to ask you about, which was “Let Me Down Easy.” It’s the only song you don’t sing leads on, and instead you have Nina Winter doing that. How did you become familiar with her?
Well, what happened was, I had this idea, and I’d written this whole…when I first joined the Eagles, my friend Bernie Leadon said, “if you want to write songs for the Eagles, don’t write lyrics, don’t write vocals, just write music. Intro, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus, out, a song structure, you know? Give those music beds to Don and Glenn, and if they hear something they like, they’ll write lyrics and melody to it,” like they did for “Hotel” and “Victim of Love” and how they did it for “Those Shoes,.” That’s how I was taught.
So I started writing this whole song, and after I produced it all with Jim Keltner and a bunch of great players on it, I set up the mic to sing it and I went “this is the totally wrong key for me.” I realized this key was really for a woman, and I had seen Nina on some background stuff she had done for me before. She’s a great demo singer, and so I had her come in and just sing it. When I heard it, and the record company heard it, they really liked it, so “okay, that goes on the record. I guess.” It’s a good song, and it’s really written lyrically from a woman’s point of view, and I thought it would be a really nice way to present a song from the old demo days that turned into something that was totally different.
You mentioned Jim Keltner, and I think him playing on that song can be a little overlooked. Most people forget that he was a Traveling Wilbury, so that must have been a crazy session.
You know, when I sit down with a song, what I do is first, I sketch demos. I take the song and record with a drum machine, and I’ll play bass on it and play the guitars until I get it up to where it sounds like, “yeah, we can make a good record out of this.” And so then, I have to cast who should play on it. So Keltner was the absolute best choice for that slow ballad. Just, he just squeezes every bit of emotion in his playing, and he lays back so comfortably on a balance like that. He’s a legendary session player, and he’s been on I don’t know how many records, but I love his field.
Yeah, I saw Petty out here in California after his first and second albums. Mike Campbell became really good friends with Henley, and was writing with Henley, so they would come, Tom and all the Heartbreakers over to Henley’s house, which used to be about not even a quarter mile from my house. We were really just ghost neighbors, practically. And so I’d see him there. I’d see him around at different different events that were going on. Grammys and that sort of stuff. We always stayed in touch.
And then, Stephen Stills and I have been friends since we were 14. He lives right down the street from me, less than a mile away. Up until probably a year ago, we were going to dinner, hanging out, doing charity events for Autism Speaks and playing golf. And I think his mobility became somewhat restricted along the way, so we can’t play golf anymore, and we’re friends for life. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Same with Petty, and it would have been the same with with Duane at the time, and Gregg. You just grow up down there in the south, and little did any of us suspect that we would all go on to be platinum selling Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrities or artists. It just that didn’t even exist back when we were starting out! There was no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Right. And I only ask that because Petty never really forgot where he came from, in terms of keeping in touch with peers from his youth. I mean, his last album before he died was literally him getting Mudcrutch back together.
Yeah, and Tommy Leadon, when he first moved to California, lived with me in the little house I had in Topanga. Him and his girlfriend lived in a back bedroom there with me. So I’ve known the Leadons, God, since ’63, ‘64 and, yeah, I try to stay in touch with as many of those people I can.
Well, thank you so much again for your time. Don. Be safe out there this summer, and let me know if you want to go guitar shopping when you’re in town.
Oh, I’d love to, you bet! I just bought a 1998 R8 from my buddies over at Guitar Shop Taiwan, and they have amazing—I don’t know if you go there or not, but there are probably about six or eight just spectacular flame tops. R9s…I couldn’t resist because the flames were just tiger stripes! Big old, beautiful…I mean, it’s like flame envy when you see that on a jumbotron, you go, “oh my God, look at the flames on that guitar!” *laughs* I couldn’t resist. I had to buy it. Yeah, let’s go guitar shopping.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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This article appears in May 22-28, 2025.