How long is hotel california song

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Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. By Luis Gomez. Luis Gomez. Follow Us twitter email facebook. The song was also rumoured to be about heroin addiction, cannibalism or devil worship the album cover allegedly shows Anton LaVey, leader of the Church of Satan.

A decade earlier, he was more forthcoming, telling NBC's Bob Costas that he and Henley "wanted to write a song that was sort of like an episode of the Twilight Zone". And then a lot was read into it - a lot more than probably exists. When he first played it to the band, they perceived it as "a bizarre mix of musical influences" and the song's working title became Mexican Reggae. Recording began in Los Angeles, but the first version of the song was in the wrong key for Henley's raspy vocals.

A second recording turned out to be too fast, so the band started again in Miami, fine-tuning the instrumentation and the lyrics in the process.

The band recorded several takes, then spliced together the best bits to create the version we know today. That's the kind of perfection we were dealing with. Once the basic track had been constructed, it took two days to record the closing guitar solos, with Felder and Joe Walsh trading riffs side-by-side in the control room.

Felder had initially assumed they would improvise this section - but Henley and Frey had other ideas. It's not right,'" Felder said in an interview with Music Radar. So we had to call my housekeeper in Malibu, who took the cassette, put it in a [ghetto]blaster and played it with the phone held up to the blaster.

The perfectionism paid off. Hotel California is the band's most enduring song, still played more than times a month on UK radio, and covered by artists as diverse as The Gipsy Kings, The Killers and Frank Ocean. When a US spy plane made an emergency landing in China in , the crew members were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nationality. Apparently, their Chinese captors considered that "the song symbolised America". Henley would have disagreed. We weren't afraid to step out and take chances.

As the leadoff track, the title song was a proper introduction to an album that would contain other material in the same vein, such as "Life in the Fast Lane" and "Wasted Time. Over the catchy result, Don Henley sings the song's nightmarish lyrics. The narrator, driving at night on the desert, grows tired and stops at a hotel. Things are immediately disturbing: He is greeted by a woman who leads him to his room as he thinks to himself, "This could be heaven or this could be hell.

The song concludes with an extended twin-guitar coda. The lyrics had the tone of a drug reverie and were filled with references to intoxicants and excess, but they also referred to criminality and imprisonment.

The Hotel California seemed to be a metaphor for the world encountered by the bandmembers, who had come from other places. Henley was from Texas and co-author Glenn Frey from Michigan.

Don Felder, who wrote the guitar riff, was a Florida native. It was a world they found fascinating and dangerous, but which they ultimately condemned without being able to escape. The ambivalence of that stance came out in the song. The Hotel California album was released on December 8, , and went to number one in early , eventually selling more than ten million copies. AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully.

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