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.
WORDS TO HOTEL CALIFORNIA 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.
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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.
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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.