Who Wrote “Lyin’ Eyes” by The Eagles?

The Eagles wrote hits like feathers falling from a wing. To wit, the band’s 1975 single, “Lyin’ Eyes,” earned the group a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Group and also earned them a nomination for Record of the Year. It hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Eagles, famous for writing songs like “Hotel California” and “Desperado,” owe their favorite restaurant, Dan Tana’s, for giving the inspiration for this song to members Glenn Frey and Don Henley. The Italian spot on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, which is still standing today, was where the song was crafted.

Who Wrote the Song?

In the end, the short answer to the question above is that it was both Frey and Henley who wrote the song. But the long answer is that Frey deserves most of the lion’s share of the credit.

As the story goes, the two musicians were in Dan Tana’s when they noticed an attractive young woman who was with a heavy, much older man. The relationship was obvious. Frey noted to Henley, “She can’t even hide those lying eyes.” After that, they got their napkins and began jotting notes. Henley says he added some final touches and helped with the music but that Frey took the lead. Frey said the song was easy to write, that it practically wrote itself even.

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Frey later said in 2013, while the band was on tour, that the song was composed in two nights. It’s also the only song on the band’s fourth album, One of These Nights, that Frey sang solo lead.

In the end, the story was about infidelity, sex, and lies. “It was about all these girls that would come down to Dan Tana’s looking beautiful,” said Henley in the History of the Eagles documentary. “They’d be there from 8 o’clock until midnight having drinks with all of us rockers, then they’d go home because they were kept women.”

“[T]he story had always been there,” said Frey. “I don’t want to say it wrote itself, but once we started working on it, there were no sticking points. Lyrics just kept coming out, and that’s not always the way songs get written.”

It was a byproduct of the world they were in the middle of. And they just had to tell the truth about what they saw.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images