The Eagles' first new studio album in 28 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," takes a short route to No. 1 on The Billboard 200 after Billboard revised a significant chart policy today (Nov. 7).

In consultation with Nielsen SoundScan, Billboard will now allow exclusive album titles that are only available through one retailer to appear on The Billboard 200 and other charts, effective with this week's charts. Prior to this, proprietary titles were not eligible to appear on most Billboard charts.

Early SoundScan numbers have the Eagles taking the top perch on The Billboard 200 with 711,000 copies sold, with most sales moved by Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. For now, the only other U.S. outlets carrying "Eden" are walmart.com, where both physical copies and downloads are sold, and the Eagles' own Web site.

"Eden" became available at the mass-market chain Oct. 30. Aside from two compilations, this is the Eagles' first album since the mostly live "Hell Freezes Over," which led The Billboard 200 for two weeks in 1994.

Britney Spears' new Jive album, "Blackout," which would have been No. 1 had the Eagles' data not been reported, will open at No. 2 with first-week sales of 290,000 copies.

"We know that some retailers will be uncomfortable with this policy, but it was inevitable that Billboard's charts would ultimately widen the parameters to reflect changes that are unfolding in music distribution," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "We would have preferred to make this decision earlier, but only became aware within the last 24 hours that Wal-Mart would be willing to share the data for this title with Nielsen SoundScan."

The revised policy initially impacts The Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums, where "Eden" will also bow at No. 1. Criteria for the remainder of Billboard's albums charts will be formulated later this week. A handful of other titles will debut this week on The Billboard 200 as a consequence of the policy revision.

Previously, titles that were not generally available at retail were not eligible to appear on The Billboard 200, but were entitled to chart on Billboard's Top Comprehensive Albums, which includes catalog titles and proprietary albums from retailers willing to report those sales.

The comprehensive chart will continue to appear on Billboard.biz, to show how catalog titles compete with the overall market. However, once parameters for the remainder of the album charts are determined, Top Comprehensive Music Videos will be discontinued, as exclusive titles will then be eligible for the Nielsen SoundScan-fed Top Music Videos.

Henley Delves Into 'Long Road Out Of Eden,' The Eagles' First Studio Album In 28 Years, In This Billboard Exclusive by Ray Waddell

"I've been biding time with crows and sparrows while peacocks prance and strut upon the stage," Don Henley sings on "Waiting in the Weeds," one of several powerful set pieces from the Eagles' new "Long Road out of Eden," the band's first studio album since 1979.

The line is pretty descriptive of the Eagles, Henley believes. "We're a band that knows how to bide its time ... how to wait," he says. "We've just been sort of waiting for some of this bad music to die down, for certain trends to go away, so we can get out there on the dancefloor again."

In this exclusive interview, Henley takes Billboard through the making of "Eden," due Oct. 30 exclusively via Wal-Mart stores.

It's great to see all those Henley/Frey co-written songs on the new record. Can you talk about how the songwriting and recording processes have changed?


The songwriting process hasn't really changed that much. The thing that has changed somewhat is the recording process, and that's because of technology. We've recorded a few songs here and there since the turn of the century, but we haven't done a whole album, and the changes in the technology are amazing.

Clearly, there is still a way to capture the chemistry, even with technology.

We still play instruments and sing. There are still some of the processes that remain organic, and that's the way we want it. But things like editing are a whole lot easier, and you can arrange a song on ProTools if you want to, add an extra verse or change the structure of the song. But what the computer still won't do is write lyrics for you. That still has to come by the sweat of the brow.

There is a lot of social commentary on this record, but there is also a focus on personal relationships and the human condition, as well.

We've always had love songs and we've always had social commentary. I think we've gotten a little bit better at both ends of the spectrum. In fact, I think our love songs have matured a little bit and the social commentary has matured, as well, and gotten maybe a little bolder. But, it's an Eagles album, it's all over the map, both musically and subject-wise. I guess there are more love songs on it than anything else. The last two songs on the record in particular are both messages from Glenn and I to our children.

Those are more about "big picture love" than "I love you tonight."

It's not just a boy/girl thing. We both have young children. We are both trying really hard to be good parents. That's one reason it took so long to make an album, because we are so busy trying to be good parents.

There's a question in the song "Do Something" that kind of struck me as, in many ways, central to the theme of this album: "How did we get on this road we are traveling?"

"Do Something" is an interesting song because it starts out like a love song, a boy/girl song, but then it takes on larger implications. And that line that you pointed out could pertain to a relationship between a man and a woman or it could be a statement about the country as a whole.

Is this an optimistic album?

I think it’s basically an optimistic album, with the possible exception of "Long Road Out of Eden." Of course, that's about the war, and it's also about the human condition. The point of the song is [that] we may think we are civilized, but we have a ways to go yet.

But I think the point of the whole album is summed up on the last song that Glenn wrote with Jack Tempchin, "Your World Now." The crux of the whole thing for me is those two lines: "Be part of something good, leave something good behind." For me that sums up everything, to my children, to my fans, to everybody. If there was one message to this album that I want to impart, that would be it.

There's another line that hit home for me on "Business As Usual": "I thought that I would be above it all by now, in some country garden in the shade." And yet here you are with a new record.

That's right. Here I am, just turned 60. I'm not complaining. I'm thrilled and delighted. None of us ever thought it would go on this long. But we are a determined bunch of guys. We take our time, we are not afraid of the passage of time, necessarily, and we've been sitting one out for a long time. That is kind of what "Waiting in the Weeds" implies. Again, on the surface that’s a love song, but it's also about this band. We've just been sort of waiting for some of this bad music to die down, for certain trends to go away, so that we can get out there on the dance floor again. We are a band that knows how to bide it's time, and how to wait.

"Long Road Out of Eden" has an interesting lyric: "Weaving down the American highway, through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk." Is that what we are doing right now?

I think so. I was originally going to write "weaving down the information highway" because I get on my computer every day and there is so much crap on the Internet, it's such a big waste of time if you aren't careful. There are wonderful things on there, too, it's such a resource of knowledge and information. But, just like television, the Internet has a lot of useless crap going on. In the end I decided that it wouldn't make a lot of sense with the rest of the song just to suddenly go over and start talking about computers and the Internet. So I changed it back to American highway just to make it broader in scope. I think with the words "cultural junk" I got my point across. I think we've cornered the market on cultural junk, pretty much.

You revisit some of those themes on "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture," where I was sorry to hear that journalism is dead and gone.

It's not completely dead and gone, of course. Obviously, there are still people out there who are trying to do a good job and trying to keep some integrity in the work. But for every one of those people, there are 20 or 30 more that are just in it for... I don't know what. Again, that is part of the cultural junk. The interesting phenomenon in this age is you turn on the news on the television or on the computer and you see all these very serious stories, like the war in Iraq, people dying and people being killed, and children being abducted and murdered. And then here comes "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" and "Hollywood Insider" and all this crap. Same thing when you go [online], you see [these stories] side by side, and we seem to give equal weight to both. Sometimes the trivial crap seems to get more weight and more coverage than the important stuff.

The coverage of this war has been, for the most part, nonexistent, except what the military wants us to hear and what the White House wants us to hear and see. That's what's appalling to me. I don't really want to hear any more about Britney Spears, I don't really want to see the train wreck.

It's just a continuation of stuff that I've been harping on for a long time now, the dumbing down of our culture and the dumbing down of reporting, and the abbreviation of everything because people's attention spans are so short. Everything is edited and chopped and shortened, from music videos to news pieces. And there's no time or place for in-depth analysis of anything, or reasonable discussion, reasoned dialogue. It's just people yelling at one another. Everything is about confrontation and controversy and sensationalism. There are no quiet voices. The quiet voices of reason get drowned out and stomped on.

In "Long Road Out of Eden" we tried to touch on all that stuff. It's hard, even in 10 minutes, but I really like it. I think that song is a good piece of work. I like some of the instruments we came up with on there, I like the last verse, the one you quoted. This album’s not perfect. If I were king, I would have done a couple things differently. I might have left a couple of songs off and perhaps made it a single album. But we vote by committee.

There is a commentary on consumerism here, so it’s not a stretch to go from that to talk about the Eagles’ Wal-Mart exclusive. Is there any kind of problem in reconciling the art and the commerce of this?

I certainly had some trepidation about it, but the business has changed so drastically. Wal-Mart is not a perfect company, but as I have said many times in print, they can't possibly be any worse than a major record label. My daddy was a small businessman and he was not a fan of big box retailers or chains or franchises. But this is just the world we live in and there aren’t many places where 60-year-old men, no matter how good their record is, can get this kind of promotion and widespread retail coverage. We are artists, but we are also businessmen and we try to live in the real world.

Some of my environmentalist friends are a little upset because we made this deal with Wal-mMart, but on the other hand I now have the direct line to the CEO of Wal-Mart. I also have a direct line and exchange e-mails on a regular basis with the two whiz-kids they have hired to make the company greener. They have a pretty elaborate and impressive plan laid out.

You really can't change things from the outside. We are certainly making our feelings known about what we believe as far as ecological stewardship and some of the practices of big business that are undesirable and wasteful, and I think Wal-Mart is making an effort.

Let me hasten to add, I am not thrilled with everything Wal-Mart has done, both in terms of doing business with us and on the environmental front and on the matter of some of their employee practices. But you could pick out just about any big company and say the same thing. We wanted to try something new. Everyone has been screaming let's have a new paradigm in the record industry; let's figure out a way to do this ourselves. Let's figure out a way to leave the big dinosaur record companies behind that have been robbing from us -- and the consumer -- for the last 60-80 years. Ever since the record business became big business, the labels have been suspect. We just thought we would try something different. Some people have praised us for it and some people have damned us for it, but that's the way it goes.

When it comes to this new album, are you at the point where you can rise above being a critic and just enjoy it?

Not yet. We just finished it [about] three weeks ago, so I don't have enough distance from it yet. Frankly, I don't want to hear it right now, because I know every little glitch, every little thing I think is flawed about it, I’ll hear. We are going to start rehearsing some of these tunes in October, so I am just trying to basically stay away from it until rehearsal starts so I won't be burned out. We've been living with these songs for a long time.

You guys have been playing together since 1994, why a new album now?

We were never a band that was able to record and write and tour at the same. When you go on tour at this age there is a lot of recovery time involved. Plus, as I've said before, we all have young children, our priorities are different. Not that this album and our music isn't important, but my kids are more important to me than anything, and that's where I put most of my energy these days.

There are some people who seem to think that this is some sort of comeback or we've been away, but, if I might say so, we've been breaking box office records all over the world since '94 and we've been touring quite a bit. It just took us a while to get on a roll again, to get into writing mode and learning how to work with each other again in a studio.

This is still very much a band effort. There is co-writing and there is a lot of intermingling of vocals, a lot of harmonies. At the end of the day, we agonized for two or three years how we were going to make an album that was going to be modern and cool and cutting edge, and finally we said "To hell with it, we are just going to be the Eagles. We are just going to do what we do."

And that comes back around to what we said before about waiting for your time to come again. We wanted to wait until some of the latest trends and fads died down, and you have to sort of wait for people to miss you. It's kind of like that joke in that old country song, "How can I miss you when you won't go away." We've always been good at getting out of the public eye and being gone for a while. You sit around today and you watch these kids who are exposing themselves -- in every sense of the word -- to death, it's ridiculous. We all value our private lives and our families and our charity work, and all the other things that we do, because those things inform our music. You won't see us at most of the award shows.

You've got an awards show coming up, the CMA awards. I've heard people say that if the Eagles were to come out today they would be a country band, but I've always looked at you as a rock band.

I think we are both. A country band wouldn't do "Long Road Out of Eden" and a rock band wouldn't "How Long" or "Do Something," so I don't think we can be put in a box. I think we defy all those labels. We are an American band and what we do is informed and influenced by just about every form of American music you can think of. There is rhythm and blues in there, there is folk, there's rock, there's country. It's all in there, which is one of the reasons I think we have a lasting appeal.

We are pretty excited about doing the CMA's. I did them once before with my friend Trisha Yearwood, I sang with her a few years back. We don't normally do award shows, but we are making an exception because we are honored and so thrilled to have been accepted by country radio. That's kind of a hard club to get into.

In this exclusive interview, Glenn Frey takes Billboard through the making of "Long Road Out of Eden," the Eagles' first studio album since 1979. "Eden" is due Oct. 30, exclusively via Wal-Mart stores.

Tell me about the songwriting and recording processes for "Long Road Out of Eden."

We've been working on this album kind of piecemeal up until the last 21 months, but prior to that what was happening on my end was, if I heard a song or I started writing a song that I thought was right for the Eagles, then I would hang onto it and kind of set it aside and say "I think this could go on our record". Through the course of the late 90s and the early part of [this] century, that was what we did.

There were times when we would work for a little while, but we could never really get everybody together to work for any long periods of time mainly because we all live in different places and we all have families. So, it became a little more difficult to parcel our time to work on the record, but in the last 21 months obviously we found a lot of time. Don [Henley] made a lot of sacrifices by coming to L.A. often to work on the record, coming from Dallas.


Don and I had a couple of very productive songwriting periods over the last couple of years. During those times we wrote "Busy Being Fabulous," "Fast Company," [and] we had started on "Long Road Out of Eden" way back in 2001. It was such a long song when we cut the track and tried to imagine verses and bridges and instrumental and all of that stuff, and I honestly didn't know that that song would ever get completed. Then Don just had a burst of inspiration and he told me one day "I think I've got the lyrics for 'Long Road'". And I said, "really?" It was a pretty long piece of material to begin with, but he did a great job finishing that song.

Other songs that we wrote together, [such as] "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture" and a couple of other tunes, in some cases we would have a chorus and some chords, and we would cut the track before we would finish the song if we thought we could come out with some good structure, and we just worked on it here and there when we could. As the record really started to take shape and when we finally got ourselves eight to 10 songs that were close to finished, then there was another big rush of material. That seems like it happens almost every time at the end of a record. You start to get your creative juices flowing and other songs show up, other ideas show up.

Don has a studio in Malibu and I have a studio in L.A. I would work on things on my own with other band members at my studio and Don would work on things on his own with other band members at his studio, and then we would MP3 our work back and forth to each other. When it came time to do background vocals we would do those and it turned out to be a very effective way for us to finish this project.

Obviously you guys still have the chemistry.

Yes, we do. I guess a lot of it was finding and making the time to really hunker down and get this done. Another reason why we ended up doing work in separate studios and e-mailing it back and forth to each other is because, unlike the old days, we have families and commitments with our careers and other interests. You can't have four guys in the Eagles show up for a trumpet overdub. It just doesn't make sense to make everybody come down for a day we are doing percussion on a song.

So we get everybody in the studio for tracking most of the time, although on some occasions I've just kind of tracked with [co-producer] Scott Crago on drums or Don would track with him and [guitiarist/co-producer] Steuart [Smith] and we would build up from there.

What were your goals starting out on this record?

I really had three main objectives for this record. The first objective, which sort of got us over the hump, was to understand we were making a record for our fans and our fans first and foremost love to hear us sing together. I believe with that as the important component, we were able to transcend worrying about whether we needed to make a modern record, a country record, a rock and roll record, a Henley solo album, a Frey solo album. All of that all fell under the umbrella of the Eagles singing and as long as we were singing and we liked the songs, then the material was right for us.

Number two, it was important that we got Henley/Frey material so that everybody, including us, knew that we didn't just work by ourselves, that there was enough collaboration to create at least half a dozen Henley/Frey songs, so we accomplished that.

The third objective was to make sure that we had Timothy Schmit and Joe Walsh represented. We worked hard to do that and I'm very happy that we got two songs for Timothy to sing and we got two songs for Joe to sing and were able to use Joe's guitar talents in the right places and showcase them. So those were the three objectives I had and I felt by the time we finished the record we had met all those.

Disc 1 kind of re-introduces the band and then Disc 2 has these massive powerhouse cuts that really take you on a journey. When you sit down and hear the whole thing at once, you really get that effect that it's a cohesive work.

Thank you for being an astute listener. I spent two days sequencing the record, and like you said I wanted to reintroduce everyone to the Eagles right away. Therefore, we put some of what I would call typical or classic Eagle's material right out of the box. And then slowly as the album plays along, we sort of get into some of the meatier lyrics. I felt that was the way we wanted to go. I didn't think you could come right out and have "Long Road Out of Eden" and "Frail Grasp" be the first songs on the record.

You guys have toured and played a lot in the last 12-13 years, did that make it easier when it came time to put this thing together?

We've been able to keep our band together and our name out there by touring and doing a few shows, sometimes more, sometimes less since the summer of 2001, but it's not like making a record. Once we rehearse and we know all the Eagles songs and everybody's parts are worked out, we are pretty much up and running. Although the physical aspect of touring can be a little taxing, it's not at all like making a record. Making a record is a much more involved, intimate, give-and-take proposition. We knew each other pretty well before 2001, so I can't say that one has much to do with the other.

Talk about the lead off single, "How Long."

The story with "How Long" is my kids were watching YouTube one night about seven months ago and they said, "Dad, come here. You've got to look at yourself." [YouTube] took it down shortly after I watched it, but they were streaming this show called "Pop Gala," a television special we did in 1974 in Holland. I guess we did about eight or nine songs on this show and one of them was "How Long." My kids were laughing at how long my hair was, and there we were playing this J.D. Souther song. And my wife said "you should do this song Glenn, this is classic Eagles" and I said, "You know, you're right." I think we learned it but we didn't record it back in '74 because J.D. Souther wanted to use it on his first solo album, if I'm not mistaken. So it just sort of sat there, but it was rediscovered and I thought "I really think we should cut this, this would fit in nicely with some of the other stuff we have on the album." So we did.

I've heard people say if the Eagles were to come out today they would be a country band, I don't know if I agree with that 100%, but certainly country radio has embraced this single.

I do not pretend to understand all that goes into that kind of thinking. Here is what I know: I never thought we were a country act. If you go back to the days of -- and these are mostly songs that I sang -- "Lyin' Eyes," "Peaceful, Easy Feeling," maybe even "New Kid in Town," I think in the 70s those would not have garnered any significant country airplay.

What I hear now on country radio, and I listen to it off and on, are what I would call pop songs with country lead singers. They become country songs because of the way they are sung. Again, I don't pretend to know what the format is and what the criteria is for country radio right now. I just know that we have a lot of fans and a lot of credibility in that genre. There is only steel guitar on one song on our [new] record, there is only fiddle on one song and it is kind of a Mexican-sounding song. We are just the Eagles and we make these records and we wrote these songs and we put them out and people are allowed to pick up on what they like or what appeals to them.

Would you care to comment on the Wal-Mart exclusive and the business side of things?

I am in the business of selling records and I want to be in a place where we have the opportunity to sell the most records. It's also nice that Wal-Mart pays us a very lucrative royalty; a royalty that no record company could come close to matching. But that's because we are not a loss leader at Wal-Mart. If the Eagles put out a record at Warner or any other major record label, part of the reason they can't pay up is we've got to pay for all of the bad acts they sign and release.

When you play "Long Road Out of Eden" how do you feel it stands up to your body of work with the Eagles?

I think it's going to stand up, I think it's going to be right up there, if you want to know the truth. If you look back on our previous albums of the '70s, those albums are four or five songs deep, and you can just about name them off of each album. You can name the three smash hit singles and then one or two album cuts that were essential to the record.

This record is like 15 songs deep and the other thing that I am really heartened by is that the quality of the recording is so much better now. I think the production level is far superior.

It seems you guys never took the easy way out; you could have phoned it in, to be quite honest, and this album never shows that.

We always felt that the amount of effort you put into anything would somehow show up in the work and I certainly hope it has.