"Love Will Keep Us Alive"

A decade after what fans feared would be the last flight of The Eagles — SoCal’s ultimate 1970s soft rockers — band mates Timothy Schmit and Don Felder teamed up with friends to try to create a new band, one they wanted to call “The Malibu Men’s Choir.”

Well, that effort failed — the new group never got off the ground — but their songwriting collaboration with Jim Capaldi and Paul Carrack did produce a hit for a re-energized Eagles when the band rebounded for its 1994-96 “Hell Freezes Over” Tour.

As diehard Eagles enthusiasts know, the tour’s name hearkened back a dozen years. Asked in 1982 by People magazine if he’d ever get the band back together, Don Henley was snide. Sure, he said, “When hell freezes over."

When the reunion did come to pass — with a lineup of Henley, Felder, Schmit, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh performing live in April 1994 at Warner Bros. Studios for an MTV special — Frey quipped, "For the record, we never broke up. We just took a 14-year vacation."

Here Comes The Song

However, The Eagles didn’t have much new material for the subsequent tour and accompanying album.

That brings us to “Love Will Keep Us Alive.” Schmit already knew this song, because Capaldi and Carrack wrote it a few years earlier during that ill-fated Malibu Men’s Choir project.

On The Eagles’ tour album, the song reached No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart despite not being released as a single. Critics noted that Schmit’s rare lead vocal gave the ballad a tender fragility.

The song was nominated at the Grammy Awards for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.

Meanwhile, Carrack — who may have had his own voice in mind when he co-wrote it — also recorded song on his 1996 album, Blue Views. Then 15 years later, he and Schmit recorded it together in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a release on the Carrack label.

Our Take on the Tune

Back in June, rolling into Huntington’s West End to play at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city’s beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the band played its then-new cover of The Eagles’ first big hit, “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”

“That was great!” the hostess said. “Play another Eagles tune.”

Uh-oh, there wasn’t another Eagles song in the Flood repertoire. Well, not yet, anyway. Then Randy Hamilton stepped up.

“I think I got one,” Randy said at a later band rehearsal. It turned out that for years Randy had been singing “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” ever since he had performed it at his sister’s wedding. “It’s her favorite song,” he added.

When he started singing for his Flood brothers, the tune just naturally slipped into a groove. Here from last week’s rehearsal is Randy leading the way!