Eagles: Funky New Year

Well I looked very hard to find a copy of today’s New Year’s themed flipside and found an audio version of the Eagle’s “Funky New Year.” The song was probably written tongue in cheek to see if the band could pull off recording a funk song during the height of the funk craze. Written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey, it features Henley on lead vocals and probably Frey on keyboards – off which the most notable is a clavinet.

The song was the flipside of “Please Come Home for Christmas” that was released in 1978 and peaked at #18. I haven’t been able to find a list of the personnel, but it appears that the recording includes the same lineup of the band as “The Long Run” album and includes, besides Henley and Frey, Don Felder, Timothy B. Schmidt, and Joe Walsh. It is an interesting recording outside of the normal boundaries that were previously set by the Eagles.