![]() ![]() And "Wasted Time" is a beautiful ballad about lost love. "Life in the Fast Lane" is a gritty rocker about the dangers of living a fast-paced lifestyle. "New Kid in Town" is a catchy power ballad about the arrival of a new member of a band. ![]() The other songs on the album are just as strong. The song is full of symbolism and has been interpreted in many different ways, but it is generally seen as a cautionary tale about the dark side of fame and excess. The album's title track is a seven-minute epic that tells the story of a traveler who arrives at a mysterious hotel and is never seen again. The album was a critical and commercial success, reaching number one on the Billboard 200 chart and spawning the hit singles "Hotel California" and "New Kid in Town." Released in 1976, it was the band's fifth studio album and their first with new guitarist Joe Walsh. The Eagles' Hotel California is one of the most iconic albums in rock history. You know what the song says about a certain hotel: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.Album Description & Collectors information: So, like any great classic rock album, “Hotel California” remains important and ubiquitous more than four decades after its release. ![]() As the sneering punks later discovered, there’s nothing wrong with being immensely popular. And, of course, just about anyone reading this probably can instantly recall the album’s songs just by seeing the titles. Modern country music is unimaginable without it - the smooth, slickly produced, tight-harmony, slightly rocky sound of today’s country stars like Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw and Florida Georgia Line draws directly from the Eagles’ California country-rock blueprint. In its own way, it became one of the most influential albums of all time. Which is not to say that “Hotel California” was some sort of popular music dead end. The Eagles, scrambling to keep up with musical trends, got noticeably rockier and funkier with their next album, 1979’s “The Long Run.” “Hotel California” was a classic that was also the end of a musical era. Popular music was changing, becoming both more rhythmic and angrier, and suddenly the Eagles seemed a bit stodgy and out of step. Within months after the release of “Hotel California,” the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads put out their first albums - with some of these artists making a point in interviews to thumb their noses at mellow, highly commercial bands like the Eagles. Punk was starting to rumble in England and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. ![]() Disco was already hustling out of the club scene. (Ironically, much of the album actually was recorded in Florida.)īut even as “Hotel California” was shooting up the charts and selling the first of more than 32 million albums, the sound of popular music was changing - radically. It was very much music of its time and place. Song titles like “Wasted Time” and “Victim of Love” and lyrics like “You call some place paradise - kiss it goodbye” were like an elegy for the malaise of the Jimmy Carter years. Opening up on a “dark desert highway” and fading out at a decadent resort, its songs evoked visions of California for listeners hundreds and thousands of miles away from the Golden State.Īt the same time, the album was bleak and cynical. Songs like “Hotel California,” “Life in the Fast Lane” (the creation of the album was legendarily cocaine-powered), “Pretty Maids All in a Row” and “The Last Resort” touch on archetypes of California life and style. In many ways, “Hotel California” was a concept album about California itself. When it was released in late 1976, it represented the pinnacle of what was known variously as country rock or California rock, a tuneful, smooth, slightly twangy, definitely mellow sound that dominated the mid-’70s, exemplified by the likes of Poco, Buffalo Springfield, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt (who had once employed the Eagles as a backing band). It also sits at a critical turning point in the history of popular music. And its iconic songs play on forever on today’s oldies radio stations and Spotify playlists.īut “Hotel California” is more than a mere classic rock album. Classic rock doesn’t get much more classic than the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Multi-hit, multiplatinum, it was an essential part of any respectable dorm-room music collection in the late 1970s or early ‘80s. ![]()
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