This 1975 No. 1 Hit Was Written in a West Hollywood Restaurant Booth — and Became The Eagles’ Breakthrough Smash

Fifty-one years ago today, the Eagles soared to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with “Best of My Love,” their first No. 1 single and a defining soft-rock anthem of the 1970s. The hit, featured on their 1974 album On the Border, began taking shape in an unlikely place: a booth at Dan Tana’s, where Don Henley later recalled working on the lyrics near the famed Troubadour.

The song’s lyrics, particularly about “coming apart at the seams” point to a failed relationship. In Marc Eliot’s biography of the band To The Limit: The Untold Story Of The Eagles, Henley admitted that he was inspired by a recent break up, according to Far Out Magazine.

Interestingly, it seems the melody for “The Best of My Love” was created by chance.

“I was playing acoustic guitar one afternoon in Laurel Canyon,” Glenn Frey told Cameron Crowe in 2003. “I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me a couple of days earlier. I got lost and ended up with the guitar tuning for what would later turn out to be ‘The Best of My Love.'”

“The Best of My Love” may not be the Eagles’ most popular track—that arguably belongs to “Hotel California”—but the song has stood the test of time.

The Eagles have a big 2026 ahead, with upcoming shows at The Sphere in Las Vegas. The band received rave reviews after their shows at the venue in 2024.

“For more than 50 years, the Eagles have been painting vivid pictures with their music, from the dark desert highway of ‘Hotel California’ to the billion stars all around of ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ to the cold, cold city of ‘Life in the Fast Lane.’ On Friday night, those images came to intense life at Las Vegas’ Sphere, where the technology of 2024 finally caught up to the band’s enduring artistry and created a technicolor display worthy of their classic, illustrative songs from the 1970s and beyond,” Billboard said.

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