I particularly like Johnson's Heartache Tonight, Jackson's Tequila Sunrise, and of course, Vince Gill's I Can't Tell You Why. Gill's voice is much more vibrant on this song then the original EAgles take, probably because he has a stronger voice to reach the high notes. Brooks & Dunn's Best of My Love is great too. So this album will remain one of my standards for as long as I can pump the volume up loud enough for me to 'hear' and fill in the blanks that I don't hear with my memories. Thanks guys!

Karen Sadler

Charity album succeeded beyond expectations
This was something new in country music - a tribute album to which each invited star recorded one song, with the results going to charity. A lot of country singers of the nineties were fans of the Eagles and they enthusiastically joined in. The resulting album contains plenty of covers of their famous songs - indeed, nearly all the original versions of these songs can be found on greatest hits compilations by the Eagles. I've met people who listen to this more frequently than the originals.

So the song selection is mostly obvious with only Billy Dean doing something different, Saturday night being his choice, but all the performances are inspired. It seems that the singers and songs are well matched. My favorite here is Take it to the limit (Suzy Bogguss) but not by much. Every track is a real gem.

I only know of one previous cover of an Eagles song by any of the featured singers here, that being Tanya Tucker's version of Best of my love, which she recorded in the early seventies. Here she covers Already gone, leaving Best of my love to be covered this time by Brooks and Dunn.

This album was far more successful than anybody ever imagined possible, so tribute albums by various artists became a regular feature of country music, but this was the first of its kind and is still among the best.

Phenominal album.
This is one of those albums you can simply leave in your stereo and let it play all day. Get over who is singing, and listen to what the Eagles have inspired musically. This is the rare occasion that a tribute album actually contains 7-8 tracks of music that sound significantly better than the original recordings. And this is the Eagles we're talking about. Buy this album!
In 1993, Nashville's biggest young stars--Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, and others--recorded an album of Eagles songs called Common Thread. When the disc went platinum, everyone hailed it as the rebirth of country-rock. If you listened closely, though, you heard neither the down-to-earth twang of country nor the metallic aggression of rock & roll. What you heard instead was the romantic sweetness of pop. More specifically, the Eagles represented the southern California pop tradition of harmony-drenched groups like the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. It's a wonderful tradition, but it's misleading to call it something else. Out there in the hinterlands you can still hear authentic country-rock, an exhilarating combination of blunt adult storytelling and blazing guitars as practiced by the likes of Joe Ely, Shaver, the Bottle Rockets, Mike Henderson, and Jason and the Scorchers. Real country-rock remains a marginal commercial force, however, and the real money is in the new Nashville version of southern California harmonies. Call it "suburban pop." --Geoffrey Himes