How ‘Hotel California’ forms a covert concept album: “It was a really insightful title”
As someone who largely got into music through the twist and turns of great lyrics, it’s unsurprising to hear that I love a good concept album. A concentrated record where one idea is giving the entire runtime to flourish and storylines are allowed to unfold. Pink Floyd, The Beatles and Eagles are but a few names to have nourished my insatiable appetite for the format, yet their success has largely failed to rub off on modern music.
Besides Arctic Monkeys’ foray into their moon based taqueria and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, few artists have adopted the wholehearted narrative approach and it’s a wonder why. The studio is already a place where the goalposts are widened and tangents are given free reign to gallop across the band’s imagination, so why not test that theory, and link each song into one concise world?
Because as Eagles proved with Hotel California, the commitment to making something compelling over the long run doesn’t dampen the individual brilliance of a song. The title track alone has enough of a legacy without being inextricably linked to the overall narrative of the album, while simultaneously acting as the storyline’s lynchpin, bringing in context to all of the songs around it.
After debating over whether the title track should be called ‘Mexican Reggae’, due to its fusing of genres, the band eventually landed on the name ‘Hotel California’ which opened up doors of creative possibility.
Don Felder explained, “Later we started talking about it, and he [Don Henley] came up with the framework lyrically of the hotel being a physical structure called the ‘Hotel California’, which there is no real Hotel California other than the one that’s down on Sunset here, the Beverly Hills Hotel is the artwork on the front of the cover.”
“But it was just a way to lay the foundation for that album. And once that concept was done, once you arrive in LA and you have your first couple of hits, you become the ‘New Kid In Town’ and then with greater success, you live ‘Life In The Fast Lane’ and you start wondering if all that time you’ve spent in the bars was just ‘Wasted Time’. So all of these other song ideas kind of came out of that concept once the foundation was laid for Hotel California It was a really insightful title.”
Despite its slick sound that seemingly embodied the excessive opulence of Californian living and more specifically, Hollywood based fame. The Eagles had fully experienced the dark underbelly of American fame and clearly understood its trappings, and so Hotel California became a cautionary tale for those who would follow.
But like all great concept albums, it stuck to its narrative principle without being wholly dictated by it. The structural bones of the idea were there and remained ever present throughout most of the album, but it didn’t hijack it completely. The result? Those wishing to simply enjoy the simple stimulation of music were satisfied, while those, acutely aware of the message it was sending were suitably lectured.
