"Hotel California" the song was released as a single on March 12, 1977, and also hit number one, going gold. The Hotel California album was released on December 8, 1976, and went to number one in early 1977, eventually selling more than ten million copies. The ambivalence of that stance came out in the song. 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. (Henley was from Texas and co-author Glenn Frey from Michigan. The Hotel California seemed to be a metaphor for the world encountered by the bandmembers, who had come from other places. 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 song concludes with an extended twin-guitar coda. 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." In the succeeding verses, the scene becomes increasingly strange until the narrator attempts to escape, only to be told that he can't leave. The narrator, driving at night on the desert, grows tired and stops at a hotel. Over the catchy result, Don Henley sings the song's nightmarish lyrics. It sounds as if, prior to composing the song, the members of the Eagles listened closely to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Bob Marley & the Wailers' Rastaman Vibration, both recent hit albums, and combined elements from each. 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." The song is built on a modified reggae beat that is not quite as syncopated as conventional reggae, with a distinctive guitar riff that recalls some of David Gilmour's favorite licks. Their songs tended to be both lascivious and prudish, detailing excesses and then disapproving of them, and the tunes that comprised Hotel California were no exception. Like much of the Eagles' output, Hotel California was an implicitly autobiographical album of songs about the group's rock & roll lifestyle. It also featured one of the more mysterious lyrics of a popular song in the 1970s.
In the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, Henley said that the song was about "a journey from innocence to experience.that's all"."Hotel California" was the title track of the Eagles' most successful regular album (though second overall to the astronomical sales of Eagles/Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975) and a chart-topping hit in its own right. The song has been given several interpretations by fans and critics alike, but the Eagles have described it as their "interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles".