Don Felder: Road To Forever

Acrimonously axed Eagle’s second solo album.

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Felder’s been in no rush to follow up his 1983 solo debut album, authoring tell-all Eagles memoir Heaven And Hell and witnessing the dissolution of his 29-year marriage in the interim. But now he’s committed a follow-up to wax, Don does a very good impression of a man who has been away from the ranch so long that he has forgotten how to rein any horses together.

Opener Fall From The Grace Of Love is daunting, its attempt to lay his heart on the line ground down by a dying, if not dead, dog of a song.

Neither expressive nor attractive, Felder’s worn rasp relentlessly hammers home hopelessly undistinguished odes to familiar subjects. Money, with its hammy air guitar on the range solo, a case in point. The search for redeeming points yields little: the undoubtedly well intentioned Heal Me merely raises a titter.

An album of wearily dogged craftsmanship – if this really is the Road To Forever, lets turn back and go the other way.

Gavin Martin

Late NME, Daily Mirror and Classic Rock writer Gavin Martin started writing about music in 1977 when he published his hand-written fanzine Alternative Ulster in Belfast. He moved to London in 1980 to become the NME’s Media Editor and features writer, where he interviewed the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer, Pete Townshend, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Dury, Killing Joke, Neil Young, REM, Sting, Marvin Gaye, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, James Brown, Willie Nelson, Willie Dixon, Madonna and a host of others. He was also published in The Times, Guardian, Independent, Loaded, GQ and Uncut, he had pieces on Michael Jackson, Van Morrison and Frank Sinatra featured in The Faber Book Of Pop and Rock ’N’ Roll Is Here To Stay, and was the Daily Mirror’s regular music critic from 2001. He died in 2022.