Hotel California

The last two minutes and twelve seconds of “Hotel California” sound improvised. They aren’t, and that’s the record’s real trick.

Don Felder wrote the music at home on a four-track, over a Rhythm Ace drum machine, and the demo already contained the ending — the interlocking guitar figures he imagined he and Joe Walsh would eventually play. When the two of them got into the studio and started inventing something better, Don Henley stopped them and made them learn the demo instead. What survives is two guitars trading, then locking into harmony, then resolving into those circling arpeggios, played essentially the same way every night for the next fifty years. It has the swagger of a jam and the architecture of a composition, and the tension between those two things is most of why it never gets old.

The rest of the song runs on the same principle: everything that sounds loose is nailed down. Henley and Glenn Frey’s lyric — a hotel you can check out of but never leave — is vague enough to have sustained fifty years of conspiratorial reading and specific enough to keep pointing at one thing, which is Los Angeles selling you a version of yourself you then can’t afford to stop being. The B-minor progression underneath never resolves comfortably. It just keeps going around, which is the joke.

It took Record of the Year at the 1978 Grammys, and it is still the song most likely to be playing when a bar closes.

Greatest of All Time. The most famous guitar solo in American rock is a written part, and it is better for it.