“Hotel California” by The Eagles

The title track of the Eagles' 1976 album Hotel California, and the second single cut from it, finds the band at their most shadowy and cinematic. Don Felder wrote the music, Glenn Frey and Don Henley wrote the words, and Henley handles both the lead vocal and the drums, singing like a man who checked in for the weekend and can't find the exit. Felder and Frey lay down chiming twelve-string guitars, Randy Meisner's bass lopes along underneath, and Felder, Frey, Henley, Meisner and Joe Walsh all stack up the backing harmonies.

The band called it their take on the high life in Los Angeles, and Henley later boiled it down, in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, to a trip from innocence to experience. Fans and critics have argued over the lyrics ever since, and that haunted-mansion ambiguity is half the pull.

The other half is the payoff: a long closing solo in which Felder and Walsh swap lead lines, then lock together in harmony and rolling arpeggios. Readers of Guitarist voted it the greatest guitar solo ever in 1998. Bill Szymczyk produced and mixed the track, and it took the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1978.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.