Hear Bob Seger’s New Tribute Song to Glenn Frey

Credit: James Glader

About four months ago, Bob Seger went down to Nashville’s Ocean Way studios to record a song he’d written about his late friend Glenn Frey. “It’s obviously not meant to be a hit,” he says. “There’s no chorus per se or title section or anything. The idea was just to honor his memory and talk, very specifically, about my impression of him in 1966 when we first met.”

The sparse, tender “Glenn Song” recounts their long friendship. “When I think about you I always smile,” Seger sings. “You were strong/You were sharp/But you had the deepest heart.” Seger and the Nashville studio pros got the song on tape very quickly. “I think it was take one or two,” Seger says. “It was the first song we did that day. I said to the drummer, ‘Hit it hard even though its a ballad and that’s a little incongruous.’ I wanted a ballad with a heavy beat because that’s the way I remember Glenn.” Instead of releasing it on a future album, Seger decided to simply give it away on his website to mark the one-year anniversary of Frey’s death. You can hear it right here.

Seger and Frey grew up in Detroit and were part…