About The Song
“Good Day in Hell” is a track by the Eagles from their third studio album, On the Border, released by Asylum Records on March 22, 1974. Written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey, it appears late in the running order and clocks in at a little over four minutes. The song belongs to the batch of recordings produced by Bill Szymczyk after the band moved away from earlier sessions with Glyn Johns, part of a conscious decision to toughen their sound and lean more into straightforward rock than the country-rock blend of the first two albums.
The recording is also remembered as the moment when guitarist Don Felder first entered the Eagles story. While working on On the Border in Los Angeles, Szymczyk suggested bringing in a more aggressive player to add slide guitar to “Good Day in Hell.” Bernie Leadon recommended Felder, an old friend from earlier bands. Felder came to the studio, overdubbed his parts on this song (and contributed to “Already Gone”), and impressed the group enough that they invited him to join as a full member the next day. That decision reshaped the band’s sound for the rest of the 1970s.
Henley has explained in interviews that the lyric grew out of the band’s view of the early-1970s Los Angeles music scene and from the recent deaths of Gram Parsons and Danny Whitten, both admired by members of the group. The song hints at late-night excess, self-destruction and the thin line between glamour and burnout, using the title phrase as a kind of bitter joke: it can feel like a “good day” even as someone is sliding toward “hell.” Rather than telling a clear, linear story, the words sketch fragments of that atmosphere and let listeners fill in the rest.
The arrangement underlines this darker edge. “Good Day in Hell” is built on distorted rhythm guitars, a firm backbeat and Felder’s slide lines weaving around the vocal. Henley and Frey share singing duties, with the familiar layered harmonies in the choruses, but the overall texture is rougher than earlier Eagles songs such as “Peaceful Easy Feeling” or “Tequila Sunrise.” Szymczyk’s production pushes the guitars forward and keeps the tempo driving, closer to mid-’70s hard rock than to the more acoustic country-rock that had first brought the band attention.
In terms of release strategy, the track was not promoted as a lead single. Instead, it appeared on 7-inch vinyl as the B-side to “James Dean,” issued in August 1974. That single reached the lower region of the Billboard Hot 100, so any chart exposure “Good Day in Hell” received was as a flip side rather than under its own name. This left the song in the category of a deep album cut, known mainly to people who owned the LP or sought out the single rather than to casual radio listeners.
Within the Eagles catalogue, however, “Good Day in Hell” is often treated as more than a minor B-side. It captures the moment when the band hardened their sound, documents Don Felder’s first appearance on an Eagles record and shows Henley and Frey sharpening the critical, slightly cynical view of fame and excess that would later run through songs like “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Hotel California.” For that reason, writers and fans frequently point to it when discussing On the Border as a transitional album between the group’s early country-rock period and their mid-’70s rock peak.
The track has since turned up on box sets and remastered editions of On the Border, and it remains a favourite among listeners who dig beyond the hit singles. Even without major chart statistics attached to its name, “Good Day in Hell” is a key piece of the puzzle in understanding how the Eagles evolved from a harmony-driven country-rock group into one of the dominant rock bands of the decade.
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Lyric
Move in
Can’t you see she wants you?
She has you deep in her eyes
You been wonderin’ why she haunts you
Beauty in the devil’s disguise
She can tell you all about it, she sees it in the stars
She’ll burn you if you try to put her down
Oh well, it’s been a good day in hell
And tomorrow I’ll be glory bound (yeah)
Higher
She can keep you loaded
Feedin’ you whiskey and wine
Fire
The devil’s on the phone
He laughs and says you’re doin’ just fine
In that big book of names
I wanna go down in flames
Seeing’s how I’m goin’ down
Oh well, it’s been a good day in hell
And tomorrow I’ll be glory bound
Truckin’
That’s all that I’ve been doin’
Every girl’s a fork in the road
Stuck in some sticky situations
Feelin’ like I wanna explode
All this gratification and sick conversation
Someone get me out of town
Oh, well, it’s been a good day in hell
Tomorrow I’ll be glory bound
It’s been a good day, been a good day