Their Album Flopped So Badly It's Still Their Worst Chart Showing — And the Title Track Became One of Their Biggest Songs Anyway

The Eagles built an entire concept album around outlaws, it topped out at No. 41 and produced zero hit singles, and the song everyone remembers from it was never even released as a single — until a woman they used to back up on tour saved it.

In 1973, the Eagles released an album that should have buried "Desperado" for good.

The record it came from peaked at number 41 on the Billboard chart. To this day, it remains the lowest-charting studio album of the band's career.

Neither of its two actual singles cracked the Top 50.

And "Desperado" itself — now one of the most recognizable songs in the Eagles' catalog — was never released as a single at all.

A melody Don Henley had been carrying around for years

The chords and melody behind "Desperado" didn't start in 1973. Don Henley had worked them out years earlier, sometime in the late 1960s.

The style leaned on Stephen Foster, the 19th-century songwriter behind "Oh! Susanna" and "My Old Kentucky Home" — songs Henley had learned as a boy from his grandmother.

After moving to Laurel Canyon, Henley sat down at a piano with his new writing partner, Glenn Frey, and played him the unfinished intro.

Frey immediately built on it, adding richer lyrics and chord changes. "Don sat down at the piano and showed me this song he was working on, and it was the intro to 'Desperado,'" Frey said later.

The Eagles, the Los Angeles band behind "Desperado."

An outlaw concept born from a birthday gift

The song didn't just appear on its own. It grew out of a bigger idea the band was chasing that year.

Songwriter Jackson Browne had been given a book about Old West outlaws — the Doolin-Dalton gang — as a 21st birthday present from a friend. Reading it, Browne, Frey, Henley, and J.D. Souther started kicking around the idea of an album about "anti-heroes," outsiders who lived by their own rules.

"Desperado," why don't you come to your senses" became the new opening line the band grafted onto Henley's old Stephen Foster-style intro.

The concept gave the record its shape: outlaws, gunslingers, and men who couldn't settle down — a theme the band, all transplants from other states chasing something out West, felt personally.

An album that flopped almost immediately

Desperado came out April 17, 1973. It debuted at a lowly No. 145 on the Billboard 200 and eventually crawled up to No. 41 — eight weeks after release.

Both of its official singles, "Tequila Sunrise" and "Outlaw Man," missed the Top 50 entirely.

The title track wasn't released as a single at all. It got scattered FM airplay on stations that occasionally played non-single album cuts, and not much else.

▶ Listen: Eagles — "Desperado" (Official Audio)

The woman who saved it

Five and a half months after Desperado came out, singer Linda Ronstadt released her own album, Don't Cry Now — and put her version of "Desperado" on it.

The connection wasn't random. Ronstadt was the reason several future Eagles had met in the first place: Henley, Frey, Randy Meisner, and Bernie Leadon had all played in her touring band before forming their own group.

Linda Ronstadt, pictured in 1974 — the singer whose cover of "Desperado" is widely credited with turning it into a standard.

Her version reached a much wider audience than the Eagles' original ever had.

Don Henley didn't dispute it. "I was extremely flattered that Linda recorded 'Desperado,'" he said. "It was really her that popularized the song. Her version was very poignant and beautiful." In a 2016 interview, he put it even more plainly: "That song didn't get much attention until Linda Ronstadt recorded it."

A slow climb to classic status

Despite the commercial stumble, Desperado eventually went double platinum in the United States, and the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000.

"Desperado" the song was later ranked No. 494 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

It took Glenn Frey's death in January 2016 for the Eagles' own studio version to chart on Billboard for the first time — 43 years after it was recorded — reaching No. 20 on the Rock Digital Songs chart.

Today it's a fixture of Eagles setlists and Henley's solo shows, closing out performances the way it never closed out a chart.

The Heartbreaking Story Behind One of the Greatest Breakup Songs Ever Written

In 1980, four people were trying to make music together while their personal lives were falling apart.

ABBA had become one of the biggest groups in the world. But behind the glitter, costumes and enormous pop hits, the group’s two marriages were breaking down.

Earlier that year, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog had divorced after seven years of marriage. They had two children together, yet they continued working side by side in ABBA.

Then came a song that would make that situation almost impossible to ignore.

“The Winner Takes It All.”

The song began taking shape in June 1980 at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm.

Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson brought in a new musical idea. At first, it wasn’t even called The Winner Takes It All. The working title was “The Story of My Life.”

The first version didn’t work.

The arrangement felt too stiff and mechanical, so they went back to the drawing board.

Eventually, Benny developed the distinctive descending piano figure that became one of the song’s defining sounds, while Björn began working on the lyrics.

And Björn had something very real to draw from.

He was writing about a relationship ending.

His own marriage to Agnetha had ended only around 18 months earlier.

But there is an important distinction.

Björn later explained that the song’s story was fictional, even though his divorce provided emotional inspiration. In other words, the lyrics weren’t literally a transcript of what happened between him and Agnetha. They took the feelings surrounding a breakup and turned them into a dramatic story.

Then came the part that makes the song so damn powerful.

Agnetha was going to sing it.

Think about that for a second.

The man who had been her husband had written lyrics about the end of a relationship.

And now she was standing in the studio, singing them.

Agnetha later described the recording as one of the strongest emotional experiences of her ABBA career. She said she could hear the sadness in the performance because both she and Björn were going through a tragic period.

Yet she didn’t reject the song.

Quite the opposite.

Agnetha has repeatedly identified “The Winner Takes It All” as her favorite ABBA song, praising its music and lyrics and describing singing it as almost like acting a part.

And that may be why her vocal performance feels so different.

She’s not screaming.

She’s not trying to overpower the music.

She’s controlled.

Almost painfully controlled.

It sounds like someone trying to keep themselves together while admitting that something they once believed would last forever has ended.

The recording itself was completed and mixed in June 1980. A few weeks later, ABBA filmed the promotional video on Sweden’s west coast, with director Lasse Hallström. The video deliberately leaned into the emotional atmosphere of the song, using images of happier times alongside Agnetha’s visibly melancholy performance.

Then, on July 21, 1980, the single was released.

And it became a huge international success.

But there was something almost surreal about the timing.

ABBA had built its image around two couples making music together.

Now one of those marriages had ended.

And instead of hiding that pain completely, they turned some of it into music.

The song’s title sounds almost cruel:

The Winner Takes It All.

But Björn later made clear that there wasn’t actually a winner in his divorce from Agnetha. The phrase was part of the fictional story he created for the song.

That’s what makes the song more complicated than a simple breakup anthem.

It’s not really about revenge.

It’s about surrender.

About looking at something that once meant everything to you and accepting that you can’t bring it back.

And because Agnetha was singing it, listeners couldn’t help hearing the real-life story underneath the fictional one.

The song was released as part of the Super Trouper era, when ABBA’s music was becoming increasingly mature and emotionally complicated. The group could still produce enormous pop hits, but beneath the polished sound were four people dealing with relationships, divorce and the realities of growing older.

And there was another divorce coming.

ABBA’s other married couple, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, would separate soon afterward. Their own breakup later influenced another ABBA song, “When All Is Said and Done.”

So the song exists at a fascinating point in ABBA’s history.

The group was still incredibly successful.

But the personal foundation underneath it was changing.

And somehow, they kept making music.

That’s what makes “The Winner Takes It All” so enduring.

You don’t need to know anything about ABBA’s history to feel it.

Anyone who has lost a relationship can understand the emotion.

The feeling that there are no villains.

No easy answers.

No way to rewind time.

Just two people who once belonged together—and eventually didn’t.

More than four decades later, the song still feels incredibly intimate.