Joe Walsh Performs Bob Dylan’s Favorite Eagles Song

Bob Dylan’s latest single release, “Murder Most Foul”, references Eagles members Don Henley and Glenn Frey, along with the song “Take It To The Limit”, prompting historian Douglas Brinkley to ask Dylan what his favorite Eagles songs were in a recent interview with The New York Times.

“‘New Kid in Town,’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’. That could be one of the best songs ever,” Dylan responded. All of these songs are part of the 1976 album, Hotel California, but “Pretty Maids All in a Row” was one of the only two tracks in the record that wasn’t written by Henley and Frey, as it was the work of Joe Walsh and drummer Joe Vitale.

Vitale recalls how the song came to be in a 2018 interview with The College Crowd Digs Me. “They were making Hotel California and Joe Walsh was writing this song. And he didn’t quite have a title for it yet. He had a couple verses of lyrics and he had verse music. He had a beautiful start. And Joe called and asked if I’d help him finish writing this song. So I went over to his house. I heard what he had and I sat down at his piano and I threw a few things at him. We were there for two or three hours, until we finally arrived at it. I wrote the chorus and added changes in the chorus. And then he added the words. And in a matter of two or three hours, we finished it,” he shared.

“‘Pretty Maids’ is kind of a melancholy reflection on my life so far. And I think we tried to represent it as a statement that would be valid for people from our generation on life so far,” Walsh reflected of the song. Here is their performance of the song during the Eagles’ 1994 reunion concert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Y6RTA7Y9k