Hotel California

1. A song made famous by the Eagles; one of the most recognizable songs of their career.
2. One of the few songs to give me nightmares as a child due to the imagery the song induced.
3. One of my all-time favorite songs by ANY band.

To me, the song represents a first time using drugs that goes HORRIBLY wrong.

Allow me to clarify. In the first verse, the lines "There she stood in the doorway / I heard the mission bell / And I was thinking to myself / This could be heaven or this could be hell" is where he meets the woman who introduces him to this new drug and convinces him to use it. The next lines "Then she lit up a candle / And she showed me the way" is where she actually helps him to use this drug, as he's unfamiliar with it.

In the third verse, the high takes a fast turn for the worse. "In the master's chambers / They gathered for the feast / They stab it with their steely knives / But they just can't kill the beast" marks where the hallucinations take a darker, frightening turn.

"Last thing I remember / I was running for the door" is his natural reaction of trying to escape the horror. "I had to find the passage back / To the place I was before" is the futility of trying to escape the place his mind was dragged to.

"'Relax,' said the night man / 'We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave'" are the final lines to the song, and feed into the paranoia the drugs have induced along with the hallucination.

Hotel California gave me nightmares as a child.

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