“The perfect ambiguity”: The Eagles song Don Henley called perfection
Every artist can normally get too much in their own head when trying to make something perfect. There’s naturally a human quality to every single song that someone puts out, and if they lined everything up and tried to make every piece of the puzzle work exactly right, then it would lose that humanity that makes people connect to a real singer talking about their feelings. But for songwriters like Glenn Frey and Don Henley, perfection wasn’t simply a goal; it was an expectation.
Going through every one of Eagles’ greatest albums, the goal was to make sure that everyone was at their best whenever the tape started rolling. The entire premise of their music wasn’t all that complicated, but it takes a lot to make something sound that breezy, whether that was getting the right vocal for ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ or forcing someone like Don Felder out of the room if it meant getting the proper take of ‘Victim of Love’.
If there was one member who knocked it out of the park every single time, though, it had to be Henley. The entire group was known as a vocal tour de force who could harmonise perfectly with each other, but whenever it came down to one person singing most of the songs, Henley had the naturally smokey register and vocal prowess that no one else could really claim to have. That can be a major advantage, but it can also leave many people a bit insecure about their own singing.
It would be one thing if Henley wasn’t writing any of the tunes, but he had full control over the big picture when it came to the band’s music. He knew that they could write some mindless songs, but the real point was to get people to think as they were listening rather than sitting by with a drink in their hand trying to tune out every other thing in the universe.
And since the band had seen the sights in Los Angeles up close for too many years, ‘Hotel California’ became the perfect vehicle for them to work in. Sculpted as something ripped out of a Twilight Zone episode, Henley and Frey painted a beautiful picture of what happens when someone is sucked into the machine of the entertainment industry and never makes it out. It’s not very specific, but that was exactly the point.
According to Henley, this was the kind of lyric that encapsulated everything that he and Frey wanted to say, recalling, “Those lyrics employ what Glenn used to call ‘the perfect ambiguity,’ and are open to a wide array of interpretations – and we’ve seen some doozies. But the song has somehow resonated all around the globe, even with people who live in countries with which our government does not have the best of relations; people whose first language is not English.”
While most people were willing to sit through ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ or ‘One of These Nights’, ‘Hotel California’ also helped them set the stage for an entire conceptual piece, with the rest of the subsequent album talking about the trials and tribulations that come with someone trying to live a life in Hollywood, whether that’s looking at the effect it’s having on the environment on ‘The Last Resort’ or seeing fresh blood on the streets in ‘New Kid In Town’.
Although Henley probably didn’t expect the song to become as omnipresent in the rock sphere as ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Hotel California’ has the kind of power that goes beyond any of its writers. This is a cautionary tale that anyone should hear if they’re thinking about work in the music industry, and even then, the terror on display might sell the experience short in many respects.
