Image Credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Getty Images “A lot of it doesn’t have to make sense.” “It’s just like a little movie,” Frey said. Released in December 1976, the song spent 19 weeks on the charts, grounding one of the most successful albums of all time and inspiring listeners to assume it was about everything from satanism to heroin abuse. Originally titled “Mexican Reggae,” the finished product was sculpted during sessions in Miami and Los Angeles, with Felder and Joe Walsh spending three days working up their epic, climactic guitar battle. Henley fleshed it out with Glenn Frey, whose lyrical images evoked what he later called L.A.’s “tarnished elegance.” “It had the two things that are necessary for life: mystery and possibility,” Henley said. “Hotel California” began as a 4-track recording made by guitarist Don Felder at a house he was leasing on the beach in Malibu. “‘Hotel California’ was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles.” Even more, it was a sweeping portrayal of the dark side of the American dream.
“We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest,” Don Henley said. Want to find out which songs were inspired by which real-life outlaws or which particular eatery? Which song was about which band member’s romantic turmoil? Which studio indulgence enhanced which track? The enduring appeal of the songs proves the band was truly it in for the long run. We look back at the band’s 40 greatest songs, with the help of past and present band members and collaborators like songwriter JD Souther and producer Bill Szymczyk. … Our main goal, at the beginning, was to write good, memorable songs, make albums that had little or no filler, that were consistent from beginning to end in terms of songwriting and production.” As Don Henley told Rolling Stone in 2016, “We wanted to create material that would showcase each of the band members’ strengths. The group’s back catalog has its share of ballads but also forays into gnarly rock & roll, soul moves, and nods to mainstream country, bluegrass and funk.
But just as the internal dynamic within the band was never as mellow as their image, neither was their music one-dimensional. From the start, the music of the Eagles was saddled with terms like “country rock” and “laid-back,” as if the band only strummed and harmonized its way through its records.
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