Don Felder says the simple act of moving provided the inspiration for his new album, The Vault — Fifty Years of Music. And maybe for even more to come.
The project — which, as the title suggests, features new songs from old ideas dating back as far as 1974 when he joined Eagles — was inspired as Felder began clearing out his home in Malibu and headed for Beverly Hills 25 years ago.
“As we were moving, I recall seeing this big cardboard box that had nothing but cassettes and DATs and 16-track tapes, 24-track tapes, two-inch tapes and CDs and stuff in it that were all demos,” Felder tells Guitar Player via Zoom.
He transferred the box to a storage locker and didn’t think about it for another 22 years, when he was switching lockers and found it again. This time, he decided to bring it home.
“Most of them were just unfinished, rough ideas,” Felder recalls. “We transferred a lot of things we thought were really good to digital. One of them was just me playing a progression on a keyboard, like an electric piano sound — no lyrics, no vocals or anything, just me playing this piano. And I don’t really play piano or keyboards very well at all. My nickname was the Claw. [laughs] But I said, ‘That’s a really beautiful progression,’ so I had to write lyrics and melody and finish the song.”
It became “Together Forever,” one of 10 original tracks on The Vault which also includes a remake of Felder’s 1981 title song for the animated film Heavy Metal. It established a modus operandi for what he’d do with the rest of the material, building songs from existing ideas and, in the case of “Free at Last” and “I Like the Things You Do,” coming up with brand-new songs from scratch.
“It was really fun,” Felder says. “I write a lot of stuff whether they see the light of day or not. I still drive down the freeway and I’ll be singing a chorus into my cell phone. I do what I can to constantly produce.
“When I’m off the road I walk into my studio here, put up ProTools, pick up a guitar, turn on an amp and start recording. I’ll just start playing, and who knows what’s gonna come out — just whatever wanders through my hands and my brain at the time. Sometimes it’s a really great guitar idea or song idea or lyric ideas. And other times they’re just bad and I press erase and off they go to digital heaven.
“I didn’t want The Vault to sound like a bunch of old songs. It’s not old songs. The only one that sounds particularly dated, and I did that deliberately, is ‘All the Girls Love to Dance.’ It was written and developed in the mid ’80s so I wanted to represent that time period. But the rest I think feel pretty current.”
Felder says nearly all of the ideas in the box “were incomplete” but he followed advice he’d been given by Eagles co-founder Bernie Leadon, a childhood friend from Gainesville, Florida.
“Bernie told me when I joined Eagles, ‘If you want to write songs with Don (Henley) and Glenn (Frey), write musical beds,’” Felder explains. “So Bernie wrote music for ‘Witchy Woman’ and songs like that and Don wrote the lyrics to it. And it’s a beautiful combination with Don Henley’s beautiful lyrics and spectacular voice.
“So I wrote music beds for the guys; I think I wrote 15 or 16 for Hotel California and two ended up on the record — one was ‘Hotel California’ and one became ‘Victim of Love.’ That combination of giving them music beds and them writing and singing on top of them was great.”
Felder’s time in Eagles was distinguished by such high points as his solos on “Hotel California” and “One of These Nights.” He also played some very distinctive electric guitars, including his 1959 Gibson Les Paul and white Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck.
But his tenure was also marred by a blowout onstage fight with Frey in 1980 and his firing from the group in February 2001. He settled lawsuits against the band and its organization six years later for undisclosed terms. Later in 2007 he published a revealing memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles (1974–2001).
As it happens, the most intriguing song on The Vault is its opening track, “Move On,” a slide guitar-flexing rocker from an idea Felder presented during the One of These Nights album sessions in 1974.
“That was one of the very first song ideas I wrote for the Eagles, right after I joined the band,” says Felder whose also contributed the album track “Visions.” “I had a little four-track Teac tape recorder and I played drums on a cardboard box ’cause I had no drums at home. Then I played the slide idea and the bass and put together this rough little sketch idea.
“I played it for Don Henley. He said, ‘Yeah, we should do this and let you be featured on slide. Matter of fact we should call this “Slide On,” where you’re breaking up with someone and you’re telling them, “Hey, just slide on...”’ But it wound up not getting done.
“When I redid the track for The Vault, I didn’t like the idea of ‘Slide On’; I thought ‘Move On’ was better — ‘Hey baby, let’s both move on’ — and I built it from there. But there’s still a lot there from what I showed Don back then.”
Felder says the new “Heavy Metal” came about after he considered re-recording “Visions” for The Vault in order to give it a technological upgrade.
“A lot of people ask why I don’t play ‘Visions’ in my show,” he says. “I think if I’m playing for 18, 20,000 people, I would say a very small percentage in the crowd would know that song. They may have heard it on the album, but it’s not something they’re going to recognize like ‘Heavy Metal.’ Everybody’s heard that song so I thought, Well, maybe I should redo that, and it came out great.”
Felder is helped on The Vault by a variety of musical pals, including Toto bros Steve Lukather, David Paich and Joseph Williams, Nathan East and Matt Bissonette on bass, percussionist Lenny Castro, an all-star corps of drummers (Jim Keltner, Styx’s Todd Sucherman, Greg Bissonette, Chad Cromwell and Brian Tichy) and vocalist Nina Winter who’s featured on “Let Me Down Easy.”
And as fans will recall, his last album — 2019’s American Rock ’n’ Roll — likewise featured an all-star cast, including Slash, Peter Frampton, Joe Satriani and Richie Sambora.
“I’ve been fortunate to have made friends with some really great people who are really great players,” he says. “I’ve known Frampton for years. Slash lives right down the street from me, so when he’s in town, he comes over if I need him and we’ll do something for charity. We’re all just friends; the people who have the rock-star egos, I don’t really call them. It’s all about working with people that you know and love in life.”
The Vault will take Felder on the road this summer as part of the Brotherhood of Rock tour with Styx and Kevin Cronin, which kicked off May 28 and runs through August 24. (He’s certain to be drinking plenty of water, following his near mishap onstage this past February.) Meanwhile he’s sitting on a load of other ideas from that cardboard box. Which means it might not be long before he dips back into The Vault for another album.
“I’m certain there’s probably another 100 song ideas I could go back to and fill out, music bed ideas that were only a verse idea or a chorus idea that never got finished,” Felder says. “There’s a pile of those things but I still like walking into the studio and turning it on and having nothing and then creating an idea on the spot, not just yelling into the phone or something like that. To me that’s as much fun and as exciting as it is walking out onstage in front of 20,000 people and playing a guitar. Both sides of it have a certain amount of risk and danger.
“Walking out on that stage, I’m thinking, I hope they like me. Walking in a studio, it’s like, Well, I hope I come up with something good. I love them both, so who knows what the next album is going to be.”
