The Long Run book a December Saturday at Phil Long Music Hall

Colorado's own Eagles tribute plays the 1,000-capacity hall at Bourbon Brothers on Dec 19; tickets run $24 to $54.

There's a certain kind of December night out in Colorado Springs that doesn't need explaining: a group of friends, a full dinner, and a couple of hours of songs everybody in the room already knows by heart. The Long Run: A Tribute to the Eagles just put one on the calendar.

The details: The Long Run plays Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers on Saturday, Dec 19, with the show starting at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $24 to $54 through Tixr, and the show was announced Oct 15. The hall holds 1,000, and the Saturday before Christmas is the kind of date that tends to go early, so the cheaper tiers are the ones to grab first.

If you've lived along the Front Range for a while, you've probably crossed paths with this band somewhere, whether you knew it or not. The Long Run bills itself as Colorado's tribute to the Eagles, and venue listings put its start around 2009, when it hit the road playing fairs and festivals across the Four Corners region. It has since worked its way up the state's stages, including Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and has kept a regular presence on Denver bills like the Oriental Theater.

What separates a good tribute act from a costume party is the players, and that's the band's selling point. The Long Run is five musicians that its own billing calls some of the busiest on the Front Range, and two of them are longtime members of the Colorado classic rock band Firefall. In other words, these are working musicians who have spent decades inside this exact era of West Coast rock, not hobbyists learning the parts from a songbook.

What separates a good tribute act from a costume party is the players.

The Eagles material asks a lot of a band like that. The songs are famous for stacked vocal harmonies and guitar parts that fans can hum note for note, which means there's nowhere to hide. That's exactly why an Eagles tribute lives or dies on its musicianship, and why a band with Firefall veterans in it has a head start.

The room suits it. Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers is a 1,000-capacity hall with the Bourbon Brothers restaurant just steps away, which makes it easy to turn the night into dinner and a show without moving the car. Colorado Springs has long had a soft spot for tribute bands; the Gazette has written about the city being home to several of them, and The Long Run has been a regular on the Phil Long Music Hall calendar.

A few practical notes. Check the Tixr page for what each price tier gets you before buying, since the range runs from $24 to $54. Give yourself extra time on the roads that week, because a Saturday a week before Christmas can mean holiday traffic and, this being December in Colorado, weather. And if you're buying as a gift, a pair of tickets to a show everyone in the family can sing along to is hard to beat.

It's not the original band, and nobody is pretending otherwise. It's a hometown crew playing songs that never really left the radio, in a room built for a good night out. That's plenty.

Sources: JamBase: The Long Run: A Tribute To The Eagles at Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers (jambase.com); Visit COS: The Long Run, Colorado's Tribute to The Eagles (visitcos.com); Visit COS: The Long Run (visitcos.com); Phil Long Music Hall: The Long Run, Colorado's Tribute to The Eagles (phillongmusichall.yapsody.com); The Oriental Theater: The Long Run, Colorado's Tribute to The Eagles (theorientaltheater.com); Colorado Springs Gazette: Colorado Springs home to popular tribute bands (gazette.com); Tixr: The Long Run, Eagles tribute (tixr.com); Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers (phillongmusichall.com)