Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder says that he wrote the song Heavy Metal for the band’s 1979 album The Long Run – and that he planned to make it a showcase for guitar pyrotechnics between himself and Joe Walsh.
As it turned out, the song wasn’t completed in time for inclusion on the Eagles’ album.
Instead, it was recorded by Felder as a solo artist for the soundtrack to the 1981 animated sci-fi movie Heavy Metal.
He re-recorded the song on his 2025 album The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music.
And in the new issue of Guitarist magazine, Felder reveals how he had envisaged this song as a heavy guitar tour de force.
He says of his new version of Heavy Metal: “After listening to it since 1981 or ’82, just the tonality and the quality of it sounded kind of dated, you know? I thought, ‘I really like that song. I love playing it, and I play it at almost every one of my live shows. I just want to do a fresh version of it.’
“I used 96k Pro Tools, and with the remastering that we have today you can make things sound really great. So I went back and re-recorded it. It was fun to do and it just sounds a lot better to me.”
Felder recalls how he wrote Heavy Metal for the Eagles after the phenomenal success of the band’s 1976 album Hotel California.
“It was going to be a follow-up on The Long Run,” he says. “It had a real kind of heavy hand to it and I wrote it so that Joe [Walsh] and I could play even harder than we did – or edgier than we did – on Hotel California, against each other. It had harmony parts, trading-off solos and a much harder rock edge.
“We went in and recorded the basic track for The Long Run but never got around to finishing the lyrics. So we had a basic track, but it just died in the Eagles’ vault until I got a call years later about doing a song for the Heavy Metal movie.
“Without the title Heavy Metal, that song could have, and should have, in my opinion, been finished on an Eagles record with Joe and I following up on Hotel with some dazzling guitar solos and stuff.
“It didn’t happen, we just didn’t have time. We had a tour booked and planned, and we were just dying to get through this record [The Long Run], the final mixes, cleaning up vocals, mastering, artwork.
“We just didn’t have time to do everything we needed to do. There were a lot of dropped ideas along the way, but I took the idea and turned it into Heavy Metal.”
On the movie soundtrack album, the title of Felder’s song was expanded to Heavy Metal (Takin’ A Ride) to distinguish it from Sammy Hagar’s song Heavy Metal.
In the Guitarist interview, Felder also talks about another song he recorded for The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music. This song, Moving On, was written back in 1974 when he first joined the Eagles.
“It was the first demo I wrote for the Eagles as a contender for a song that might wind up on an album,” he says.
“Bernie Leadon, my high school friend and [Eagles] bandmate told me, ‘If you want to write songs for the Eagles, don’t write lyrics, only write music, like a song structure.’
“So it was like intro, first verse, second verse, chorus, third verse, chorus, solo, chorus, chorus, chorus, outro, right?
“Every time I would write song ideas, I wrote them with no lyrics, no vocals, no nothing.”
Felder says he is delighted with the finished results in The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music.
“I breathed new life into some great old ideas.”
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