Peaceful Easy Feeling: How Eagles Defined Their Laidback Image

Who originally sang Peaceful Easy Feeling?

The first recorded version of Peaceful Easy Feeling was by Eagles. The song came to the band directly from Tempchin, who was a friend of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne (himself the source of another early Eagles classic – Take It Easy). “I was sitting in his piano room playing my new song,” Tempchin said in 2012. “Glenn Frey heard it and asked what it was. He said he had a new band that had only been together eight days and he wanted to know if I’d mind if they worked it up.” This would have been early 1971, when Eagles formed.

“The next day, Glenn brought me a cassette of what they had done with it,” Tempchin said. “It was so good I couldn’t believe it.” Peaceful Easy Feeling became a firm favourite with the young Eagles, and with their earliest fans. It was included on Eagles’ 1972 self-titled debut album, and was also released as a single on 1 December 1972.

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In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Frey reflected on the mix of songs Eagles contained. “It’s a statement of our backgrounds,” he said. “The Eagles were conceived as a song-oriented band.” The album’s mix of rock, country, bluegrass and California sunshine proved irresistible, and Peaceful Easy Feeling – the title and lyrics unironic, simply being an ode to a post-hippie enjoyable lifestyle – was a key song in the album’s success.

Peaceful Easy Feeling was also performed by the band, in 1974, on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. This was an important US music show throughout the 70s and showcased virtually every notable rock performer of the decade. Peaceful Easy Feeling kicked off Eagles’ set on the show; joining the band that night were two very special guests, their friends Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne.

The song remained part of Eagles’ live repertoire, even much later on in their careers. Glenn Frey said in 2013 that, though he was personally tired of performing Peaceful Easy Feeling and Take It Easy, it was still important to do so: “There’s people in the audience who’ve been waiting years to see us do those songs.”

What is the meaning of Peaceful Easy Feeling?

Girls, women and love are at the heart of Peaceful Easy Feeling. There was nothing cynical or arch about the song. “As young guys, we were unable to stop looking for love for even one day,” Tempchin said in 2012, reflecting on how he would gaze at pretty girls, noticing little details about them. He and his friends would “watch the beautiful girls on the bus-stop bench and fall in love with them until their bus came”.

Who played guitar on Peaceful Easy Feeling?

Glenn Frey played acoustic guitar on Peaceful Easy Feeling while Bernie Leadon played an electric guitar outfitted with a B-Bender. The B-Bender is a specific device that enables a player to alter the pitch of a B-string; it was a relatively recent advance in guitar technology, having been invented in 1968 by two members of The Byrds (Gene Parsons and Clarence White). Leadon was one of the earliest customers for it, and the B-Bender’s effect can be heard on Peaceful Easy Feeling’s distinctive guitar solo.

Leadon is an innovative multi-instrumentalist; alongside guitar he plays banjo, mandolin, steel guitar and dobro. He is often credited with bringing a rootsy, grounded feel to Eagles’ music, stemming from his deep knowledge of bluegrass. “I think of my guitar as tools in a toolbox,” he remarked in 2004. “I’m a journeyman musician, and I have good tools.”

Who has covered Peaceful Easy Feeling?

Appropriately, one of the first covers of Peaceful Easy Feeling was by easy-listening titans The Geoff Love Singers, on their 1976 album, Take Me Home Country Roads (for which they were billed as The Geoff Love Country Singers). Love and his singers mellow the track out even further, taking it far from rock and into the realms of sweet aural mood music.

Country band Little Texas recorded the most famous cover version of Peaceful Easy Feeling, as part of the 1996 compilation album Common Thread: The Songs Of The Eagles. This was a charity album, organised by Don Henley, to benefit the Walden Woods Project (which worked to preserve forestland in Concord, Massachusetts). In 2020, Little Texas stated that they still played the song live. “Eagles were one of our favourite bands,” Del Gray, the group’s drummer, said. “Our acoustic guitar player, Dwayne O’Brien, sings that song.”

Yet nothing can beat Eagles’ original, which captures the carefree spirit of the band’s earliest days. It also brought songwriter Jack Tempchin into the group’s fold, and he would go on to co-write further Eagles classics: Already Gone, The Girl From Yesterday, Somebody and It’s Your World Now. Tempchin remains very proud of Peaceful Easy Feeling, and of how Eagles transformed his material.

“I thought, it’s not actually a love song, it’s just kind of [a] different idea,” he once said. “The record that they made just had a magical feel.”

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