Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder has completed a 45 year cycle by completing the song ‘Sun’ for his new album ‘American Rock ‘N’ Roll’. He wrote the song for Eagles in 1974. Henley and Frey rejected it.
“I wrote that music for ‘Sun’ in 1974 just as I joined the band,” Don Felder tells Noise11.com. “It was right after my first son (S-O-N) was born and it was called ‘First Glimpse of My Son’. Probably one of the most grandeur beautiful parts of a human’s life is seeing their first child born. That unbelievable, overwhelming tsunami of emotion and tears that comes along with that is such a beautiful thing. I wrote that song called ‘First Glimpse of My Son’ and I played it to Don Henley and Glenn Frey and they went “that’s really beautiful but you wrote a song for yourself … next. Let’s get back to writing for ‘One of These Nights’”. They just brushed it aside”.
When Don started work on his third solo album ‘American Rock ‘N’ Roll’ he revisited the Eagles reject. “When I was working on this record I loved that piece of music and wanted to find a way to broaden lyrically what that song is about,” Don say. “So instead of writing it about my son, I went down a different spiritual path that I thought a lot of people could relate to. When we are finally born into this human body and you open your eyes for the first time and get that first look at that beautiful, sterling light that is coming from the sun, it is your first glimpse in a human body of the sun. As you go through you realize that you are back here to take it all in for the first time. Then at the end of the journey, in the last verse it says ‘a warm crossing of life’. It says that when we pass on we are going to see that next sun, whatever it looks like. Whatever dimension of space and time it is. I gave a different meaning to the song, instead of writing it just about my son. Ironically the song that they passed on, that I thought would have been a really beautiful vocal take for the band to do, turned out to be one of my favourites on the record. Although itis not the Eagles singing, it is in that reflectionary period of 1974”.
Don says that ‘Sun’ is the only piece of his work from the 70s on the new album. “I think that one song ‘Sun’ is something I really liked the music to. I decided to rewrite the lyrics and centre the focus in a different direction. Everything else is written much more currently”.
Don Felder wrote 16 or 17 songs for Eagles ‘Hotel California’. Only two, ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Victim of Love’ were used. He has not gone back and listened to the ones that weren’t used on the label but says they still exist. “As a matter of fact I was just thinking the other day that I should get back to my storage lockers and find those cassettes that they were on. I should give them a listen. There may be some interesting stuff on there”.
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