The First Song Don Felder Submitted to the Eagles Never Made it Onto the Band’s Albums, and Took Him 50 Years to Finally Record

By the time guitarist Don Felder joined the Eagles on the band’s third album, On the Border, they were impressed by his playing slide guitar on “Good Day in Hell,” one of two songs in which he was featured. “The next day [after recording],” Felder tells American Songwriter, I got a phone call from Glenn [Frey] asking me to join the band.”

Felder later went on to co-write two songs (“Too Many Hands,” “Visions”) on the band’s fourth album, One of These Nights, along with co-writing their classic “Hotel California” and “Victim of Love,” and contributing“The Disco Strangler” and “Those Shoes,” on the Eagles’ The Long Runl a year before the band split in 1980.

After joining the band in 1974, Felder started writing some songs to submit to the band, including one called “Move On.” Initially, Felder recorded “Move On” on a four-track TEAC tape recorder. At the time, he didn’t have drums, so he used a cardboard box and put a microphone on it. “I recorded two minutes of me playing drums on a cardboard box,” says Felder, who also added some chord progression and bass to the track.

Early on with the Eagles, Felder remembers his high school classmate and founding member of the Eagles, guitarist Bernie Leadon, telling him ’’If you want to write songs for the Eagles, don’t write lyrics, don’t write melodies, just write music beds in a song structure—the intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus—just a framework.”

Videos by American Songwriter

He knew Leadon was on to something since the guitarist co-wrote the band’s 1972 hit “Witchy Woman” with Don Henley from the Eagles’ self-titled 1972 debut. The single fared better on the charts (at No. 9) than the band’s classic debut “Take It Easy,” which peaked at No. 12.

“So I mixed that [‘Move On’] down onto a little cassette and gave a copy of it to Don Henley, just like Bernie suggested,” adds Felder. “He [Henley] said, ‘I really like that. We should write a song called ‘Slide On,’ and I went, ‘That just sounds a little corny to me.”

Then, the Eagles were getting ready to go on tour, and by the time they started working on their next album, One of These Nights, they had already written plenty of songs for it.

“In my opinion, the combination of Don and Glenn [Frey] was the American Lennon and McCartney, just a great songwriting team,” Felder says, still very proud of his time with the Eagles, despite past rifts and legal battles with the band. In 1994, Felder rejoined the Eagles for their Hell Freezes Over tour and live album, which reunited the band’s The Long Run lineup of Henley, Frey, Joe Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmit.

The Eagles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and three years later, Felder was fired from the band. In 2001, Felder filed a lawsuit against the band for wrongful termination, which was later settled out of court in 2007.

[RELATED: The Story Behind the Eagles’ Tribute to Hollywood Icon “James Dean,” Co-written With Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther]

The Vault is a continuation of what Felder started several years after the Eagles initially parted ways in 1980. After releasing his 1983 debut Airborne, Felder continued collaborating with artists, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, Paul Simon, and Alice Cooper, among many others. He also worked on several film soundtracks, including the 1981 animated movie Heavy Metal and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) in the interim, before releasing his second album, Road to Forever, in 2012, followed by American Rock ’n’ Roll in 2019.

Ultimately, “Move On” (or “Slide On”) never made it onto any of the Eagles albums and was left in storage for nearly five decades before Felder dug up the early demo in 2020. After transferring the track to digital, Felder began finishing the song with lyrics and melody, then recorded “Move On” as the opening track for his 2025 album, and his fourth as a solo artist, The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music (out May 23).

The album features a collection of songs recorded over five decades along and features Toto‘s Steve Lukather, David Paich, Joseph “Joe” Williams, and Greg Phillinganes, drummers Greg Bissonette, Brian Tichy, and Todd Sucherman, along Felder’s daughter Leah James and granddaughter Eva Jenner on vocals, and other special guests.

“I learned how difficult it is to just write music beds without any melody, so when I went back and heard those cassettes, I wrote the melody and lyrics,” shares Felder. “Each one of them took me back to exactly where I was when I wrote them.”

Photo: Don Felder at the 8th Annual Love Rocks NYC Benefit Concert for God’s Love We Deliver at Beacon Theater on March 7, 2024, in New York City. (Photo by Adela Loconte/Shutterstock)