 This video was sponsored by Skillshare. The first thousand people to go to skl.sh slash polyphonic 0820 will get two months of learning absolutely free. This video was also made possible by my incredible supporters on Patreon. This was one of my first stretch goals for Patreon and I'm really really excited to hit it. You guys are incredible and you help make this channel possible, so thank you so much. I don't remember the first time that I heard Hotel California. Honestly, I doubt that a lot of us do. For those who were born after its 1977 release, Hotel California has become a kind of cultural pillar. It's always been there, in movies, on music lists, getting regular circulation on classic rock radio stations. But more important than that, it's been talked about. Since before there were video essays and Reddit threads, since before there were genius and music forums, people have theorized as to the true meaning of the song. And today I'm here to tell you definitively what the true meaning of Hotel California is. Let's take a closer look. Okay, so as cool as it would be if I could tell you the true meaning of Hotel California, that's just not possible. There is no one true meaning to any song, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But even if there was, I don't think that's the most interesting part of Hotel California. I think it's far more compelling to look into how the Eagles were able to craft a song so mysterious and so memorable that its lyrics still captivate music fans to this day. So that's what I'm going to do in this video. Along the way, we're going to look at some of the many interpretations of the song and we'll learn what was on the Eagles mind when they wrote it. Now we can cue the music. Hotel California started its life in the Malibu beach house. Don Felder had rented the place for the summer and sat in the bedroom with a 12 string guitar one July afternoon. He developed a handful of melodies and put them to tape with a four track recorder. One of these melodies was an eerie piece made from descending arpeggios. When Felder handed his tapes over to Don Henley, it was this descending riff that caught his bandmate's ear. Henley was driving through California at night and the music's dark, creeping sounds seemed to provide a perfect soundtrack. Most of the Eagles were still relatively new to California at the time, including Henley himself. In an interview with Team Rock, he said that he and his bandmates viewed Beverly Hills as a mythical place. It was a place full of hope and dreams where miracles could and did happen, but it was also a hollow place full of excess. Using Felder's riff, Henley and fellow lyricist Glenn Frey began to pen lyrics explaining their feelings about California. But the lyrics weren't only inspired by their own experiences, they were also drawing on the world of literature. The atmosphere of Hotel California was inspired by The Magus, a 1965 novel by John Fowles. That book follows the story of Nicholas Irfy, a young teacher who travels to the island of Fraxos in Greece. While there, he meets a rich recluse named Maurice Conscious. Unbeknownst to Nicholas, Conscious runs him through an elaborate series of psychological experiments, shifting the world around him until he loses any sense of reality. This surreal unreality resonated with Henley and Frey, who saw parallels between Fowles' protagonist and their own experience in California, so they set out to make lyrics that would create that sense of unease. In an interview with Cameron Crowe, Frey explained, We take this guy and make him like a character in The Magus, where every time he walks through a door, there's a new version of reality. We wanted to write a song just like it was a movie. In that same interview, Frey said the band were trying to make the lyrics cinematic, mentioning the Twilight Zone as another influence. We see the cinematic lyricism in the opening verse. It's a sensual song describing the smell and feel of the air, and it puts the listener in the same headspace as the main character, entering into a strange and unknown world. That sense of unreality and confusion pervades the next two verses. Our main character flashes through a series of rooms, peering in on strange scenes and having eerie conversations. In between, we're treated to a bright, cheery chorus that serves as a sharp contradiction to the atmosphere of the verses. When we look at this through the context of the Eagles California experience, a clear meaning emerges. There's a bright image of California, home to Hollywood and the music industry. It's a world of beautiful people and beautiful beaches, of huge concerts and huge houses. It's a world that so many people aspire to, a world that seems idyllic from the outside. In the first verse, our hero enters the world, but already he gets a sense of its risks. In the second verse, we get to see the glamour of California with the wealth and parties, but there's also something lost when the hero asks for wine. For many, this line represented the shift in the music industry. Through the 1960s, rock and roll felt like it was part of a revolution. The psychedelic movement was filled with utopian optimism and an authentic belief in finding a better way to live. But as the decade turned, the music industry grew jaded and cynical. It turned out that the promise of revolution was easy to sell and the music industry turned into a living experiment in cutthroat capitalism. Meanwhile, the mind-expanding psychedelics gave way to newer, heavier drugs. Cocaine and heroin took over the music industry, and it became a world of excess. In the third verse, we see this play out, and we learn about the dark underbelly beneath California. There's a glamour, but there is also a rot at the core of the rockstar lifestyle. And in the song's famous final couplet, we learn the greatest horror of all. Try as you may to escape the world of fast money and hard drugs. It'll always call you back from some distant hallway. When you know the intentions of Henley and Frey, it's easy to read Hotel California as a cautionary tale about the Hollywood lifestyle. But that's not the only meaning people have pulled from the song. The Eagles themselves have also described it as a loss of innocence, something echoed in a popular interpretation that says the song is about a romantic relationship. In the first verse, the hero is desperate and alone, but then he meets a woman and they marry. In the second verse, things become rocky as materialism creeps into the relationship, and the hero yearns for better times in the past. And then in the final verse, the character tries to escape the relationship, tries to get back to who he was before. But in the end, he knows that he has changed from it. Another interpretation reads the song as being entirely about drugs, Calidas being code for marijuana, and the mirrors on the ceiling being a cocaine reference. One of the most popular readings of all reads it as a religious allegory, with the hotel being a metaphor for hell. Once again, this reading is easy to see in the lyrics as it's a song full of religious references. So why is it that there are so many takes on Hotel California? Well, I think this speaks to the way the song was written. The Eagles specifically wanted something open-ended. Glenn Frey even once said, Vagary is the primary tool of songwriters. Henley had similar responses when pressed on the meaning of the song. Talking with Joe Seder about the line that refers to wine as a spirit, Henley had this to say. That line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a socio-political statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting. For the Eagles, the beauty in music lies not in its clear messages, but in the way that its messages openly defy clarity. The nature of songwriting lends itself to metaphor and open-ended interpretation. And that's a good thing. Hotel California stays open-ended thanks to masterful use of metaphor and symbol. Humankind is drawn to symbols we always have been. It's a function of pattern recognition in our brain left over from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Every culture has its own complex language of symbolism, and that inevitably makes its way into their art. Hotel California is ripe with symbols and metaphors that resonate with Western audiences. The biggest of these are of course the Christian references. Whether we're religious or not, we live in a world shaped by Christian symbolism and mythology. We all know that heaven and hell represent any of the thousand binaries in life, and that candles and bells are representative of ritual and ceremony. On the other hand, we all understand, at least to some level, the mechanisms of wealth and materialism. So we know that images like champagne, Tiffany's, and Mercedes are not simply statements of objects, but instead are representative of the world that creates and promotes these objects. The Eagles sprinkle these kind of familiar symbols throughout the song, and I think the greatest example of this is the very setting for the song, the hotel. Hotels are uncanny places, strangely familiar, yet somehow off. So many of them try to look and feel the same, trying to recreate the familiarity of home. But of course, they'll never truly be home. With smiling doormen and picture perfect rooms, there's something about hotels that's always just slightly off, and there's horror to be found in that dissonance. It's no coincidence that just 51 days after the Eagles released their hotel horror, Stephen King published The Shining, an all-time horror classic set in a haunted hotel. As a symbol, the hotel can be anything from an industry to a country, from a state of being to the very afterlife itself. For the Eagles, it allowed them to describe their personal experiences, and for the audiences, it became a blank canvas to project our own meaning onto. It can be about the excesses of California, but that's not all it has to be. It can be about the temptation of sin, it can be about the troubles of navigating a relationship, and it can be about the dark shadows lurking behind any number of bright facades in all of our lives. The lyrics of Hotel California are nothing short of a masterpiece. They're simultaneously narrative and poetic, creating a kind of beautiful ambiguity. As a writer, I personally aspire to someday write like that, and that's why I loved Hanif Abdurakheb's Writing for Expression on Skillshare. That course teaches you how to use poetic language in any kind of writing, be it original fiction works or video essay scripts. And that's just one of the thousands of courses that Skillshare has to offer. Skillshare is an online learning community for creative and curious individuals, where millions of people come from across the globe to share their expertise and learn new skills from others. Members get unlimited access to thousands of classes on a whole host of topics. So if writing isn't your thing, you can also check out my friend Thomas Frank's class on Mastering Habits. In that class, you'll learn how to set realistic goals for yourself and how to go about reaching them. So if you want to get started today, go to skl.sh slash polyphonic0820. The first thousand people who click on that link will get two months of Skillshare premium absolutely free. And after that, an annual subscription is less than 10 bucks a month. Not only will you get free access to thousands of courses by following that link, but you'll also be doing a ton to help my channel and to make it so that I can keep putting out these videos week after week. So thank you guys so much.