The Eagles track ‘Hotel California’ is one of their biggest hits. With big hits comes many questions, not only about the production but also about the lyrics. For instance, during a 2009 interview with Cleveland, Don Henley was asked about the lyrics that read: ‘So I called up the captain / ‘Please bring me my wine’ / He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”
The interviewer asked Henley whether he had any regrets about his mistake of using the word ‘spirit’ to describe ‘wine,’ considering wine is fermented and not distilled. When his conscious choice of words was critiqued as a mistake by the interviewer, Don replied:
“Thanks for the tutorial, and, no, you’re not the first to bring this to my attention – and you’re not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I’ve consumed enough alcoholic beverages in my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is.”
The singer went on to share that a big regret he has about ‘Hotel California’ is that he has to explain to people his literary choices. He added:
“But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It’s a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.”
Besides criticisms about words choices, there was allegations of stolen lyrics. Jethro Tull’s frontman Ian Anderson shared that the track was similar in terms of cord sequences to one of their songs ‘We Used To Know.’ Even though there were accusations of plagiarism, Anderson shared where he stood by saying:
“It’s not plagiarism. It’s just the same chord sequence. It’s in a different time signature, different key, different context… It’s difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn’t been used and hasn’t been the focus of lots of pieces of music.”
You can read Don Henley’s 2009 interview with Cleveland here and listen to ‘Hotel California’ as well as ‘We Used to Know’ below.
