Eagles / Selected Works 1972-1999 / 1976
Try and Love Again
wistful but cautiously hopeful
A mid-70s Eagles track about the tentative decision to risk romantic vulnerability again after loneliness, built around a hesitant narrator who watches a woman dancing and talks himself into trying. It trades the band's usual narrative density for a simpler emotional arc that resolves into pure vamping repetition by the end.
recovery from loneliness risk of romantic vulnerability hesitation and self-persuasion fleeting attraction moving on
Who's speaking
First-person narrator addressing himself as much as any listener, working through indecision aloud; a woman he observes functions as catalyst rather than fully drawn character, so the voice reads as introspective and a little unreliable about its own resolve.
What happens
The song opens with a generalized meditation on loneliness and isolation, then narrows to a specific moment of attraction at what sounds like a dance or gathering. The narrator weighs whether pursuing this feeling is worth the risk of further hurt, and the song gradually abandons argument for assertion, ending in a long, almost ritualistic repetition of the decision to try.
How it's built
The structure moves from reflective verses with more conventional imagery into a call-and-response chorus built on a direct question-and-answer pattern, before dissolving into an extended coda of chanted phrases. This gradual stripping away of lyrical content in favor of repeated vocal hooks mirrors the song's theme: thinking gives way to doing.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins in abstraction, addressing a generic 'you' adrift in memory and solitude, setting up loneliness as a condition to be escaped rather than a specific personal history.quote absent here
Pre-chorus
“the lonely feeling's gone”
A brief, almost clinical report of healing, measured out in increments of time, suggesting the narrator is already partway through grief before the song's central dilemma even arrives.
Second verse
Attention shifts outward to a woman dancing, described impressionistically through glances and movement rather than specifics, functioning as the spark that reactivates the narrator's desire to connect.
Chorus
“Should I stay or go?”
The central hesitation is posed as a literal fork in the road, framed explicitly as a gamble between loss and gain rather than a romantic certainty.
Bridge
A brief acknowledgment that past mistakes can't be undone shifts the song's logic from asking permission to accepting consequence, setting up the turn toward action.
Outro/coda
The extended repetition of the decision to try, stripped of argument or imagery, enacts rather than explains resolve — the song essentially talks itself into motion through sheer reiteration.
Craft
- rhetorical question
- The chorus poses the dilemma directly as a question to the self, dramatizing indecision rather than describing it.
- synecdoche
- The woman is rendered mostly through fragments — her eyes, her movement, her song — keeping her more symbol of possibility than fully realized person.
- repetition/incantation
- The extended outro of repeated phrases functions less as lyric and more as a kind of self-persuasion mantra, enacting the resolve the verses only discuss.
- circular imagery
- An early image of cyclical motion sets up the song's broader idea that emotional patterns — loneliness, attraction, risk — repeat rather than resolve neatly.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about the mechanics of re-entering emotional risk after isolation — not a love song to a specific person so much as a song about permission-giving, where the woman is catalyst more than subject. An alternative reading, equally plausible, sees it as a straightforward attraction song in which the hesitation is just conventional romantic shyness; the lyric is simple enough to support either without firmly resolving which is intended.
Context
This track is a deeper cut relative to the band's major hits and reflects the mid-70s Eagles sound — glossy, mid-tempo soft rock with strong vocal harmonies — though I don't have reliable specifics on its writing or recording history, so any biographical claims here would be speculative.
Listen for
- the shift from narrative verses to chant-like repetition in the back half
- how the question-and-answer phrasing in the chorus dramatizes indecision
- the way imagery of the woman stays fragmentary rather than detailed
- vocal harmonies carrying emotional weight once the lyrics thin out toward the end
About Eagles
The Eagles are an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1971. With five number-one singles, six number-one albums, six Grammy Awards and five American Music Awards, the Eagles were one of the most successful musical acts of the 1970s in North America.
1971 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue