Nearly all the commentary I’ve read this week about the late Glenn Frey has focused on his work with the Eagles, which I guess isn’t too surprising given the band’s position in the rock pantheon. And the sad truth is that his solo career never really caught fire the way his bandmate Don Henley’s did. Even so, he did score a few hit singles during the 14 years between the Eagles’ breakup in 1980 and their 1994 reunion, and those are worth mentioning, in my opinion. The biggest of them were from soundtracks: “The Heat Is On” from the Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop, and “You Belong to the City,” a beautifully moody, bass-and-sax driven anthem that was featured prominently in the second-season premiere episode of the TV phenomenon Miami Vice. Both songs reached number-two on the Billboard charts, and “You Belong,” in particular, was inescapable during my junior year of high school. Hearing it now instantly catapults me back to that time and place, and conjures up all sorts of emotional detritus and half-memories, in a way that few other songs do. But that’s probably another entry…

Also noteworthy was “Smuggler’s Blues,” a number-12 hit that first appeared on Frey’s album The Allnighter, but is more associated with (again) Miami Vice, which used the song in a first-season episode of the same name. (The episode is said to have been inspired by the song’s MTV video, in which Frey plays the smuggler of the title; Frey played a different character — also a smuggler — in the Vice episode, which led to other acting gigs in the TV series Wiseguy and Nash Bridges, and most notably in the feature film Jerry Maguire.)

However, the song that came immediately to mind when I decided to blog about Glenn Frey’s solo work is a bit more obscure than those others. Another soundtrack tune, “Part of Me, Part of You” from the 1991 film Thelma & Louise only reached 55 on the Billboard Hot 100. Nevertheless, I heard it a lot during the spring and summer of 1991, when that film was playing at the movie theater where I worked and I was cleaning up the auditorium every two hours while the end credits ran in the background. I loved Thelma & Louise, and I love this song, which manages the nifty trick of wrapping an upbeat “road tune” sound around a core of melancholy lyrics.

Those lyrics suggest to me the unspoken thoughts of a mentor, a parent, or maybe an insecure lover, depending on how you interpret them; their bittersweet suggestion that time is short and relationships evanescent has become especially poignant over the years as I’ve lost people, endured changes (some more welcome than others), and gotten old. There have been times when this song has made me too sad to continue listening… and other times when it’s simply brought a smile and the itch to get behind the wheel of my old Galaxie again. The fact that the man singing the song is now gone as well just adds another layer of meaning for me.

I’m sorry to say the video isn’t much to write home about. Like most videos for film music, it’s just a collection of clips from the movie interspersed with Glenn singing with a soulful expression. And this particular instance of the video isn’t even of very good quality, but it was the best version I could find. Just listen to the music and enjoy the visual of that long, sleek, beautiful T-Bird cruising through the southwestern deserts, and try to imagine me at the age of 21…