Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Don Felder Shares Candid Eagles Stories & Why His Album ‘The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music’ Is A Must Listen (INTERVIEW)

It’s a beautiful spring day in sunny California, and Don Felder has something other than an interview on his mind when he calls me: “I might have to go out and jump in the pool later this afternoon,” he says with a hearty laugh that sounds very genuine. He may live across the country from his hometown of Gainesville, but sun and water are still very much a part of him. “I’m a Florida boy just living in California.”

Felder, a former Eagles guitar player who has long been a solo artist, is excitedly telling me about his new album, The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music, which drops on May 23 as he starts a tour opening for Styx and the Kevin Cronin Band. Felder is the epitome of a seasoned entertainer still bubbling with enthusiasm because he has lots more to say with his music. His voice has an I’m feeling great ring to it, and he laughs easily when telling stories of the past and the present. 

The eleven songs that make up The Vault sound fresh, crisp, insinuating happiness, contentment and a vibration of I’m not an old fogey yet, kids. Rocking out with “Move On” and “I Like The Things You Do,” turning a serious lyrical eye to “Hollywood Victim,” reflecting on spirituality with “Free At Last,” paying tribute to his former bandmate Glenn Frey on the instrumental “Blue Skies” and re-rocking his movie theme song “Heavy Metal,” all add up to some good time music for his fans. As Felder told me, The Vault is “A combination that goes back fifty years of music ideas I’ve had and written and made demos of that I turned into reel masters by rerecording them all.”

Although it’s been five years since his last studio album, American Rock ‘n’ Roll, Felder hasn’t been sedentary. He’s been touring and messing around with songs in his home studio. As with previous records, Felder brought in some of his good friends to add their talents to his songs. Toto’s Steve Lukather and David Paich, his singer-songwriter daughter Leah James, and drummers extraordinaire Jim Keltner, Brian Tichy, Gregg Bissonette and Todd Sucherman give The Vault that extra oomph that all rock & roll records have. Add in bassists Nathan East and Matt Bissonette, percussionist Lenny Castro, and keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, and we’ll be cool rocking, baby.

Felder definitely knows about cool rocking. A member of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame with The Eagles, he slid into the band with his slide guitar playing and helped them reach superstar status with his “Hotel California” and “Victim Of Love.” The Eagles were dominators of the seventies with hit after hit until the pressure of staying at the top resulted in a well-publicized hiatus. “When I was in the Eagles, all the time that it took to be in that machine, you really didn’t have a lot of time to write and produce and be free to do other music other than what the Eagles demanded,” Felder told me in a 2012 Glide interview. “Between the touring, writing, and studio work in that band, it was pretty much all encompassing. When I left the Eagles in 2000, I finally decided that one of the things that was missing in my life was being able to write, record, and play my own music.”

Although he tends to share primarily the good memories of his time in the band that made him a household name, there were some well-documented trials and tribulations, which you can read about in his 2008 memoir, Heaven & Hell: My Life In The Eagles. As for today’s Don Felder, he still loves making music, hence his time creating The Vault and touring with old friends. I spoke with the singing, songwriting guitar player – who learned to play slide from Duane Allman – about his new songs, an old record and that little incident in February while on the Rock Legends Cruise.

Tell me, how are you feeling? You scared us there for a minute.

Well, I have to tell you, it looked much more dramatic than it really was (laughs). As a matter of fact, nothing like that has ever happened to me. I was backstage before the show feeling great, talking to my manager, his wife, some friends that were back there. I walked onstage, I’m walking around, halfway through the set I introduce “Tequila Sunrise” and the next thing I know, I’m getting really faint. I think I grabbed my mic stand so I didn’t fall down. My girlfriend, who was on the side of the stage, comes running over and helps me off the stage. She saw that I was not doing well. And there was a guy in the audience from Gainesville, Florida, where I grew up, who was a paramedic, who watched this and ran backstage and took my pulse and everything and said, “He’s dehydrated. You’ve got to get him downstairs and get him an IV.” 

So they wheeled me downstairs really quickly, gave me an IV, and thirty minutes later I was like, “Okay, let’s go finish the set!” (laughs). And they said, “No, everybody’s left.” And I went, “No!!!” (laughs) But it was literally just dehydration. They let me play the next night and I continued on the rest of that cruise. But it was scary, to tell you the truth. My phone has never blown up as much in my entire life. I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in twenty years! (laughs). But I’m feeling fantastic.

It’s a scary feeling when something like that happens, especially as we get older.

Yeah, I do a lot of medical stuff, only because, for example, Danny Fogelberg. I think he had prostrate cancer and nobody detected it and it spread all through his lower GI system and into his liver and kidneys. It was just out of control before they really determined what it was [Fogelberg died in 2007]. So when that happened, I started going in and having heart specialists take a look at me, running EKG’s, blood pressure, all the stuff you want to do as you age. It’s like looking under the hood of your car and seeing what’s leaking. No leaking in there yet? No, we’re still good (laughs). 

So you’re ready to start a new tour?

Yep, we have a tour package going out and I have a record coming out on May 23, and the tour should start that same week. So we’re going to be busy all summer till September and then I’m going to try and run away to either France or Italy for a week or two to kind of cool my heels and eat some food (laughs).

Tell us about your early days loving music

When I was a kid back in the fifties, there was no iPad, there were no iPhones. We had three television channels that were black and white. Well, I discovered that a kid across the street from me had an acoustic guitar in the top of his closet and I traded him a handful of cherry bombs for the guitar. An hour later, all those cherry bombs were gone but I had a guitar. So all the spare time that people are now on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, on their phones and all that stuff, I was then sitting on the front porch learning to play, finding people that could show me a chord. There was a guy a couple of blocks around the corner from me that taught me a couple of songs, like “Red River Valley” and a couple of other really simple songs. And once I saw Elvis Presley on television, shaking his hips and flipping his hair and the girls screaming, I went, I think I want to do that! That looks like fun to me! (laughs). 

So I spent all my time when there was nothing else to do except build forts in the woods and ride your bike on dirt roads and stuff like that, I spent a lot of my time just learning to play guitar. I was just infatuated with it. And I still am. As a matter of fact, it’s my favorite place to go. No matter if I’m up and happy and writing songs like “I Like The Things You Do” or I’m writing songs that have more of a spiritual like “Free At Last” or writing songs that are emotions that we all share at one time or another that people can relate to, it’s my way of expressing in music my life experiences.

Tell us about writing songs..

I just walk into a studio, like my studio – I’m sitting in it right now – I walk into my studio and it’s dark and I have no idea what’s going to happen. I turn on all the equipment, pick up a guitar, plug it into an amp, and I have systems all set up so I can just put something on input and it’s ready to go, put on record and I just start playing. I don’t know what I’m going to play. I don’t know if it’s going to be any good or make any sense or not. But I just give myself the opportunity for things to come out. And usually when you’re feeling a certain way, those are the things that come out. If you’re rocking out about something, you’re up and happy, you write a rock track. If you’re much more sensitive, something is going on emotionally with someone, a loss in the family or something like that, you write something that is more emotional. It always comes from emotion. 

When I was in New York, I learned to improvise. I had a Jazz Fusion rock band and instead of playing the same solos every night, like I have to do in “Hotel California,” we would just improvise, we’d just make it up, like Jazz musicians, just there on the spot. We had songs but there would be long solos in the middle where you could just go. So it became a very valuable talent that I developed in New York, being able to walk into a recording studio and just make up a solo or sit down, like Don Henley said at the beginning of Hell Freezes Over, when we did the acoustic version of “Hotel California.” He said, “This needs a special introduction.” I went, “Well, what do you mean? You’re going to say something about ‘Hotel’?” He said, “No, no, make up something.” So literally we’re on the stage with a full orchestra behind us, there’s about fifteen video cameras running, recording truck recording all the audio, and I’m hoping I’m funny what I make up (laughs). The whole acoustic introduction that I just made up on the spot was just pulled out of thin air. So it’s really fun and challenging to be able to step out and not know what you’re going to do and just let that energy, that creative idea, just flow out of you. I love that.

Speaking of fun, the new album has such a fun vibe to it but there is some seriousness in there as well, lyrically. What did you really want to emphasize with this album?

You know, I had a thought not long ago about writing an album, cause you usually get ten songs on an album; ten or eleven on vinyl, and I wanted to write an album that really documented with songs from birth to teenage to young adults to seniors to passing on; just the periods of life that we all go through, in songs that would relate to each one of those periods of life. I haven’t really sat down to do that yet – may be my next album, I don’t know (laughs) – but the things I’ve experienced will always come out in lyrics. 

Now, a lot of the songs on this record, some of them go back to 1975, the original ideas; and some of them, like “Free At Last” and “I Like The Things You Do,” were brand new ideas I wrote while we were going back through all these things in the vault. So it’s a combination that goes back fifty years of music ideas I’ve had and written and made demos of that I turned into reel masters by rerecording them all.

With “Move On,” that’s an early seventies song. Why did you pick that one out of all your little noodles to revisit?

It was the very first demo I wrote when I wrote and performed with The Eagles. After I had been asked to join The Eagles, my friend Bernie Leadon said, “If you want to write songs for this band, write music bits in the song format;” like introduction, verse one, verse two, chorus, verse three, chorus, solo, chorus out. A song structure. So that was the very first one I did. I had a four-track little tape recorder, no drums so I played the drums on a cardboard box playing the beat (laughs). I picked up a bass and played a bass for a rhythm guitar part and then I played slide on it because they had hired me and brought me into the band because of the slide recording we made on “Good Day In Hell.” 

So I thought, well, I’ll write a slide track. I gave it to Don and Henley loved it. He said, “We should call this ‘Slide On,’ like a relationship breaking up and you’re saying, ‘Hey Honey, just slide on, this isn’t working out.’” When I listened to it I thought, no, I like “Move On” better. I think move on is something in a more positive way, to move on when you’re in a relationship that’s not working. Eventually you get to, well, it’s time to move on. That’s really what that song is about. And I had just gone through a relationship about five years before now, where I had been engaged to somebody and it was just not working and too difficult so it was time to move on. That’s what that was written about.

“Hollywood Victim” has a great slinkiness of it

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Hollywood and walked down Hollywood Boulevard and the stars on the street and all the, I don’t want to say human litter on the sidewalk, but it is very slinky and I wanted to make the track sound kind of slinky too. That was indeed the idea. And every time you go into a restaurant out here, I would say the waiters, the waitresses, the bartender, everybody out here is here to be a star or they want to be on TV, they want to write scripts, whatever it is. The town is full of people that are here and very, very, very few people get the opportunity and have the talent to go forward with it. So a lot of people that come out here, especially young girls, get victimized by guys talking them into doing the wrong thing for their career. So it just shows a little bit of the slinkiness of Hollywood, I think.

Tell us about the origin of “Heavy Metal,” which was for the movie. Did they come to you with a preconceived idea of how they wanted the song or did they give you free rein to write a song?

They gave me free rein but the initial idea for that song was something that I had written for The Long Run. It was to be a follow-up to “Hotel” where Joe and I could actually sit and play, trade out solos, play harmonies together, and it never got finished. We cut the basic track but we never had lyrics and vocals and everything. It’s still in the vault somewhere with The Eagles recordings. So when I got asked to come in and look at this movie and see if I’d write a song for it, I went in and looked at it and I said, You know, this is either going to be a huge hit or a giant flop, because it’s an animated movie for adult dopers, druggers, smokers, you know (laughs). So I went, okay, I’m going to write a song, what’s it going to hurt. So I went back home and I took the idea since the name of the movie was Heavy Metal, I wrote that song and it steals some of the ideas from that demo that I had made for The Long Run that we recorded but we never finished. So I took that and rerecorded it and I rerecorded it again because when I listened back to the original master of that, which I think was 1981 or 1982, it just sounds old. It doesn’t sound fresh and new and crisp so I rerecorded the whole thing, redid all the guitars, remixed it, remastered it and made a 2025 version of a 1981 song.

Did you use the same guitar you had played back then?

I did! I used the same guitar, my 1959 Les Paul. But the sounds today are just fresh, it’s digital, it’s remastered; it just sounds completely fresh and new, where the old thing sounded analog, you know what I mean. It was time to take an old classic and bring it up to date.

You do a song with your daughter Leah, “Together Forever.” When you wrote that song, did you have her in mind to sing with you?

It was funny because the reason I was digging back through this vault, I had boxes full of old cassette demos, 8-tracks, CDs, all sorts of different formats of ideas over the years. So I found this keyboard part and it was me just playing a keyboard progression and my nic-name when I play keyboard is The Claw (laughs). I’m not a great keyboard player (laughs). So I heard that demo and I said, man, that’s just such a beautiful progression, I need to rerecord that idea. So I redid it with me playing guitar and got some friends of mine, great session musicians, to come in and play on it with me, and then I got to writing the lyrics and I wrote “Together Forever” and I thought it’d be really great if I can get Leah to come in and sing it with me and it would be something that we could share together forever. She is just honestly an angel. I don’t how I ever got so lucky to have her as a daughter. But she has taught me so much. Usually it’s the parent teaching the child; she has taught me so much about kindness and love and she is just a sweetheart.

For you as a guitar player, what album in your catalog of music do you feel top to bottom you were at your most creative as a guitar player?

I would say most likely it was Hotel California. The combination of guitar between Glenn and myself and Joe was a wonderful blend to have. That’s why I wrote songs to include Joe, like “Hotel California.” Joe and I had already been playing together in Joe Walsh & Friends, on videos, we played opening for Elton John at Dodger Stadium, so it was time for me to write something that Joe and I could play together. So I wrote the basic track for “Hotel California” and a lot of the guitar ideas on that same record, there’s so many other songs on there that I got to play very creative guitar parts and had the freedom to do pretty much what I heard, which was great. 

So I would say that album is probably the height of my old creative period. I would say now, like for these new songs on the album, “Free At Last” and “I Like The Things You Do,” if you listen to those, I play all the guitars on both of those records, on almost all of the tracks on this album. But I was experimenting with a lot of different sounds. Having guitars that are making sounds you don’t normally hear in a record, that jump up, tones and stuff and changing guitars from the verse to the chorus and having different things come in and go out along the way, it’s just unique approaches to getting different new fresh sounds, creative sounds, out of the same instrument.

You end with “Blue Skies,” which you’ve said was a tribute to Glenn, and it’s a beautiful little piece of music. Is that something you had from the past?

I had started with something like that to play just an acoustic song with the string quartet, that idea years and years ago, and I had kind of diddled around with that thought and with that little acoustic melody but nothing final until we got to this record and it was after Glenn’s passing. I had gone to see this beautiful quartet play here in LA two or three times, just magnificent, and I said, maybe I can get them to record their string quartet on this track. So I recorded the music and then I had Elton John’s keyboard player, Kim Bullard, who was a good friend of mine, write the score for the quartet and the combination of my little guitar idea and the string quartet and Elton John’s keyboard player’s arrangement of the string quartet all worked really well. I was very proud and it was a nice way to honor Glenn and his passing.

What was it really like in the studio trying to record The Long Run?

That was the most uncomfortable album I think I ever made. There was a lot of pressure coming off of Hotel California to produce another Hotel California. And the pressure to do that and intimidation of coming out with something that was going to fall short of Hotel California was just looming in the air every day in the studio. Glenn got so stressed out once because he only had one song on the record that he left the studio in Miami and got on a plane and flew back to LA. So we had to get Bob Seger to help write a song because Bob was really good friends and had worked with Glenn in the past, to help write a song with, I think, JD Souther and Don Henley. Those four guys got together and wrote “Heartache Tonight.” So Glenn was just stressed out because it was so difficult to just freely create. We had this pressure over us and there was a lot of long days and we had a day that we had to leave to go on the road so we had a definite amount of time and we were really under pressure to finish all these songs, record them all, mix them and get them done before we went on the road. So it was a very trying, difficult time for everyone under that self-imposed pressure of what Glenn used to call, “We created a monster with Hotel California and it ate us.” (laughs) That’s the best way I’ve heard it put.

What was one of the funniest things that has ever happened to you onstage?

Wow, I’d have to think about that for a minute. I don’t have a lot of calamity onstage but I would say that lovely dehydration episode a couple of months ago was the biggest calamity I’ve ever had onstage (laughs). I just wish it happened closer to our album release time so I could’ve gotten all that press and talked about that and the album (laughs).

What is the most beautiful guitar you have ever seen?

You know, I have over 300 of them and I have my old 1959 and my 1957 Strats and a bunch of old guitars. But I have to say the most unique thing that I have is I have two guitars that are like a brother and sister. They’re small-sized guitars and they were made by David Linley, who is Lord Linley. I don’t know if you know who Lord Linley is in England but he is part of the royal family and he made them. He created this thing called a computer aided design CAD and he figured out a way to have CAD, when he did these designs, go in and cut inlays absolutely perfectly with laser. They are just magnificent pieces of beautiful artwork in wood and he gave me those two things because he was moving from his house to another house because his wife was pregnant and they needed more bedrooms. But he was staying at Princess Margaret’s home in Kensington Square when I went in to meet him and his wife and was presented with those two guitars. Those are very special guitars for me. I keep them in my house. They’re not just in storage in a locker. I take them out and play them on rare occasions but they are just lovely pieces.

Of all the guests on your new record, which song did you know immediately which artist was going to play on it and why them?

A lot of my very close friends are bass players, drummers, keyboard players, and when I have a certain track, I know how these people play and what they sound like. So like David Paich plays keyboard on a couple of songs. I’ve known David since the seventies. Steve Lukather comes in and plays guitar with me on “Digital World.” So I know how they play. As a matter of fact, when David and I get together, we start not only doing overdubs on these tracks but we start playing song ideas for each other. And when Luke comes over to my studio, we spend the first forty-five minutes just laughing and telling jokes and stories and having a lot of fun before we actually do the guitar parts (laughs). 

It’s not like, he can play great, I can play right along with him. I know these people very well and I can cast them and the way they play appropriately in a song. I think that’s a big bonus, that you know somebody that well. It’s like Abe Laboriel. I don’t know if you know who he is but he’s a monster, really famous bass player. I met him when I was working in that studio in Boston and he was going to Berklee School Of Music. He came over to this studio and played bass on this one track and I said, “You’re going to be playing bass on every record we make here.” The best bass player I’d ever heard but he plays with a very kind of Latin feel about it. So when I recorded my last album, I had this song called “Little Latin Lover” and he was the call to come play bass on it and he just did an amazing job, because I know how he plays and feels and it was just the appropriate call for that track. So I usually cast the people that I know how they play for the appropriate song I need them for.

Jack Casady once told me that he is forever chasing tone. What has been your forever chase with your music?

I think the whole process of having a concept or a thought, whether it’s driving down the street or the freeway or singing a melody into the phone or picking up a guitar and noodling around and something comes out, like “Hotel California,” it’s the whole process to me that is just magical. That’s why I’ve done this for as long as I can. I don’t know where these things come from. I don’t know where the lyrics and thoughts come from. I don’t know where the guitar solos come from. But I just open myself up and let whatever I’m feeling and playing come out in music. To me, that’s probably the most enjoyable experience, next to raising kids and having family, that I’ve ever had in my life.

Live photos by Leslie Michele Derrough