The Eagles will always be associated with the mellow country rock that came out of Southern California in the early ’70s. They knew it, too, and as music trends changed they tried to change with them.
Their last album before their initial break-up, 1979’s “The Long Run,” responsed to the rise of disco and punk by injecting some R&B flavor. The title track of the album, a No. 8 hit, is a straight-up cop of a 1972 Memphis soul song, “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You,” minus its funk, so it still sounds like the Eagles.
“I Can’t Tell You Why,” on the other hand, sounds like an actual soul song, something Hall and Oates would write and Luther Vandross might sing. If you heard it without knowing the artist, you’d make a lot of guesses before you landed on the Eagles.
A big reason for that is the lead vocal by Timothy B. Schmit, who joined the band in 1977 when original bassist Randy Meisner couldn’t handle touring anymore. (Years earlier, Meisner left Richie Furay’s band, Poco, to join the Eagles; Schmit replaced him in that band, too.) Schmit already had the basic parts of the song written, but it had the country-rock feeling Glenn Frey and Don Henley were trying to move beyond.
Frey told Schmit, “You could sing like Smokey Robinson. Let’s not do a Richie Furay, Poco-sounding song. Let’s do an R&B song.” Henley called the result “straight Al Green.” I’ve played it for people without telling them who it was, and those too young to remember when it reached No. 8 on the Hot 100 in 1980 never guess who it is. It was the band’s last Top 10 hit.
You can hear Schmit’s backup vocals on dozens of albums by an array of artists, Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs, Jimmy Buffett and Crosby, Stills and Nash among them. That’s him singing the high part on the outro of Toto’s “Africa”; he played 12-string guitar on it, too.
