Songfacts®:

• This country-tinged song tells a plaintive tale of a breakup where both the guy and the girl aren't sure if ending it was the right thing to do. With a lead vocal by Glenn Frey, it's sung from the guy's perspective as he struggles to make his choice: go back to her, or move on. He decides she's part of his past, not his future. She's the "girl from yesterday."
• Frey wrote this song with his longtime collaborator Jack Tempchin. They formed a bond in the late '60s after Tempchin saw Frey perform in San Diego. When the Eagles took flight, they included Tempchin's song "Peaceful Easy Feeling" on their debut album, and on their third album, On The Border, recorded another Tempchin song, "Already Gone."
  
  After the band broke up in 1980, Frey and Tempchin wrote songs together, many of which ended up on Frey's solo albums. Among them: "The One You Love," "I Found Somebody," and "Smuggler's Blues."
  
  "The Girl From Yesterday" was another song aimed at a Frey solo album, but then the Eagles got back together in 1994. The band had been apart for 14 years and was quite combustible, so instead of writing and recording an album of new material, they decided to make a live album and DVD called Hell Freezes Over with a handful of new songs, starting with one Frey wrote with Don Henley called "Get Over It." "The Girl From Yesterday" was repurposed as an Eagles song and included as well, one of four new songs included on the set. The album contains a studio recording of the song, and the DVD includes the live version.
  
  The song stayed in their setlist for the Hell Freezes Over tour, which introduced the concept of $100 tickets. By this point, Eagles fans were a little older and willing to pay a few bucks to hear this kind of mature, poignant breakup song.
• Glenn Frey's "girl from yesterday" was his first wife, Janie, to whom he was married from 1983-1988. Frey re-married in 1990.
  
  When he appeared on the Songfacts Podcast in 2022, Jack Tempchin told the story behind this song: "I remember it clearly because I have a little house in Hollywood, and that's where Glenn would come and we would write. He went through a divorce, and then he later got happily married. I was going through some bumpy times, so he was like, 'Let's get even with the old girlfriend in a way by writing a song called 'Girl From Yesterday.''
  
  So we were writing it and we really liked it, but we got to the last verse and we're going, 'What's going to happen? Is he going to get back together with her or not?' Well, it's up to us, we're creating it, so it turned out that no, she's just always going to be the girl from yesterday."