During a recent chat with the KSHE 95 radio station, Don Felder replied to a question asking whether he is still earning money from the Eagles’ hit, ‘Hotel California,’ which he co-wrote with Don Henley and Glenn Frey.
The musician explained:
“Anytime you write and publish something like that, you get writers royalties, publishing royalties, and record sale royalties when that’s on it for an AirPlay performance. There’s all that stuff. So yeah, I still make money on that. I would just say that ‘Hotel California’ has been very, very good to me.”
As Felder recalled in an interview with Gear Factor in 2019, the making process of ‘Hotel California’ was challenging as Don Henley insisted that Felder should’ve replicated his performance in the demo. So, the guitarist had to listen to it repeatedly to create the same guitar work. He explained:
“I’m, like, ‘What do you mean it’s not right?’ He’s [Don Henley] going, ‘You got to play it just like the demo.’ He’d been listening to the demo over and over for over a year now, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what the hell I played. I just made that up.’ He said, ‘Well, we got to get that down so you can learn it.’
So I had to call my housekeeper back in Malibu, and she went through a bunch of cassettes, put the cassette, the original demo cassette, in the blaster, played it, and put the phone up to it so we could record it in Miami so I could sit and learn what I had just, you know, thrown off the cuff.”
You can listen to Don’s chat below.
