“Hotel California” started off as a Don Felder instrumental. It’s well-written and well-recorded, and I hate it. (In that way, it’s not too different from “ New Kid In Town,” the previous Eagles #1 hit and the song that immediately follows it on the Hotel California album.) It’s luxurious fake-deep rich-guy misery. In this case, it’s also about how the Eagles, kings of California when they wrote the song, were alienated and disconsolate, fed up with the world they saw around them. It’s “ American Pie” all over again - free-floating poetic profundity, grasping at making a sweeping generational statement while mostly being about its own depth. None of this hangs together, and none of it is supposed to. Some of the lyrics of “Hotel California” are nasty little shots at one of Don Henley’s exes: “Her mind is Tiffany twisted / She got the Mercedes bends / She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends.” Some of them are paeans to the lost purity of the hippie era: “I called up the Captain, ‘Please bring me my wine’ / He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.'” Some of them are hallucinatory depictions of hedonism and excess: “In the master’s chambers, they gathered for the feast / They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.” (That last line is a nod to Steely Dan, too, or maybe a dart thrown at them.) He stops for the night at a desert hotel, sees a beautiful woman, and goes off on some existential-dread head trip. He’s either smoking weed or really taking in the aroma of the local plant life. The opening line is a great one: “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair / Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.” It’s filmic and sensual, and it puts you in a particular place at a particular time.
#What is hotel california song about full#
That’s probably the best way of understanding “Hotel California” - an ode to this beautiful and mysterious place that turns out to be full of rot and decay and hopelessness.Īt its best, “Hotel California” is a song full of resonant imagery.
Felder has spoken of the way Los Angeles, when you’re driving through the desert, glows like a light on the horizon long before the city itself comes into view. Frey has talked about how Los Angeles was still a place of mystery and romance for the band - even after they’d lived there for years, and even after they’d helped define the place in the cultural imagination. All of them had been living in California for just about a decade when they wrote the song, but none of them were native Californians. The three Eagles who wrote “Hotel California” were Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey. Instead, they wrote the song about their own vague assortment of ideas: innocence ending, the dream of the ’60s dying, the degradation of American values, the romance of California. (There are probably other theories, too.) The band didn’t have any of those meanings in mind. It’s the most perfectly ambiguous thing they ever did.ĭepending on who you ask, “Hotel California” is about: drug addiction, rising divorce rates, a mental hospital, or the Church Of Satan. With that in mind, “Hotel California,” certainly the most famous Eagles song, might also be the band’s defining work. Instead, they made vague gestures at profundity, and people could then take those vague gestures and spin them off into their own interpretations. The Eagles had ideas that they wanted to get across, but they didn’t want to express those ideas with too much precision. Glenn Frey had a nice phrase: “The perfect ambiguity.” That purposeful vagueness, according to Frey’s old Eagles bandmate Don Henley is what the band always had in mind when they were writing lyrics. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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