Some songs arrive like a plan. “Heartache Tonight” arrived like a phone call.
By the autumn of 1979, the Eagles were chasing the impossible: a follow-up to Hotel California. The album that became The Long Run dragged on for months, the sessions were tense, the band was fraying — and Glenn Frey still needed one more song he could sing lead on.
So Frey did what songwriters do when the room goes quiet: he called a friend.
At his house in Los Angeles, Frey and the singer-songwriter J.D. Souther spent an evening listening to Sam Cooke records, clapping their hands, snapping their fingers, and singing along to those old shuffles. Out of that easy groove came the first verse:
“Somebody’s gonna hurt someone
Before the night is through
Somebody’s gonna come undone
There’s nothin’ we can do.”
Two long verses, really — and not much else. No chorus. No ending. Just a feeling. The melody, Souther later said, sounded very much like those Sam Cooke shuffles.
Stuck on the chorus, Frey picked up the phone and called Bob Seger. He sang Seger the verse down the line, and Seger — without pausing to think — sang back the line that would become the whole song: “There’s gonna be a heartache tonight, a heartache tonight, I know.”
Seger remembered it the same way. He and Frey were sitting at Frey’s house, Seger playing bass, Frey on guitar, when the line simply came out of him. “We hadn’t been sitting down for more than five minutes,” Seger said. “And I just blurted out, ‘There’s gonna be a heartache tonight.’ His eyes lit up huge.”
By one in the morning, Joe Walsh was at the house, writing the bridge on guitar. Souther came in right after Walsh that same night to help with the lyrics. The next day, Don Henley added his share. Four writers, one phone call, one long night — and the song was done.
Frey later said there were no heavy lyrics in it, that the song was more of a romp — and that was exactly what it was intended to be. Handclaps, slide guitar, and a chorus built to be shouted back by a whole room. Billboard praised the handclaps for their “young, vital sound”; Cash Box called the record a “partyin’ country-rock groove.”
Released on September 18, 1979, as a single from The Long Run, “Heartache Tonight” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 52 on October 6 — the fastest-rising single the Eagles ever had. Five weeks later, on November 10, 1979, it reached No. 1. It stayed on the chart for fifteen weeks, with one week at the top. It was the fifth No. 1 of the Eagles’ career, after “Best of My Love,” “One of These Nights,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Hotel California” — and it was the last one they would ever have. The single was certified Platinum for one million copies sold, and it won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
Frey sang lead, with Henley on drums, Walsh on slide guitar, Don Felder on rhythm guitar, and Timothy B. Schmit on bass. Seger sang backing vocals too, though his voice was not credited on the album’s liner notes — his name is there as a songwriter, alongside Henley, Frey, and Souther.
Seger himself never recorded his own version of the song, and he had a good reason: it sat at the very top of his range. “It’s hard to sing!” he said. “It’s at the highest end of my range, really blasting it.” He did not want to face a lifetime of singing it onstage.
Within a year of the single’s triumph, the band was gone. The Eagles broke up in 1980, after a benefit concert on July 31 of that year that went down in the band’s lore as the “Long Night in Wrong Beach.” “Heartache Tonight” stands as their farewell to the top of the chart — a last No. 1 that sounds, fittingly, like a party.
The song lived on. Conway Twitty took his country version to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in 1983. John Anderson recorded it for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles, Michael Bublé cut it for Crazy Love, and Tom Jones performed it on his television show in the 1980s.
Forty-seven years later, the record still does the same trick it did on the night it was written: it takes the worst night of a relationship and turns it into the best three minutes of the drive home. Sometimes heartache sounds like a celebration.
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