This song is awesome and never gets old. This song is so easy to relate to because its meaning is here. For example people mining on the land, putting up more buildings to live in this paradise world and dream of this so called "heaven". And after the destroy one place, they move on to another. And the "jesus people" belive that if you don't do what they say, that were all useless, but if the world wasn't overrun by these people, then the earth's land wouldn't be "raped" as they mention in the song, definitely one of my favorite Eagles songs.

This song is awesome and never gets old. This song is so easy to relate to because its meaning is here. For example people mining on the land, putting up more buildings to live in this paradise world and dream of this so called "heaven". And after the destroy one place, they move on to another. And the "jesus people" belive that if you don't do what they say, that were all useless, but if the world wasn't overrun by these people, then the earth's land wouldn't be "raped" as they mention in the song, definitely one of my favorite Eagles songs.

Floyd84 is right. Its a great song, probably my favorite lyrics. Basically hes saying that some people neglect the earth because they think that there is a heaven. They think that there is someplace better. But he believes that the earth is "the last resort". "There are no more new frontiers, we have got to make it here". IE This is heaven.Take care of it. My thoughts exactly.

it's not anti-Christian, but it IS anti-hypocracy.
It's not JUST about Pepperdine U's development in Malibu ("paradise") in the 1969-1971 period, which could be one example of raping the earth in God's name.
Like most Eagles works, it is a very good song and can be taken on many different levels, somehting that good music or works of art end up (intended or not) doing.

Europeans and other "true" immigrants that came to America, killed the real Americans, you know the old tired story,

They spoke about the red man's way,
and how they loved the land
And they came from everywhere
to the Great Divide
Seeking a place to stand
or a place to hide

and turned this once beautiful place to crap.
Also people seem to say this alot. They skipped the part that says about the massacred Americans and go forth to say about later years and Christianity...

We satisfy our endless needs and
justify our bloody deeds,
in the name of destiny and the name of God

This is the type of crap people say when god isn't even with you, you are saying this so that you don't feel guilty.

I get the feeling this song is about the beauty and brilliance of the Rocky Mountains and how terrible it is that the wilderness of the USA is dying off.

"She packed her hopes and dreams
like a refugee..
She heard about a place people were smilin'
They spoke about the red man's way,
and how they loved the land
And they came from everywhere
to the Great Divide
Seeking a place to stand
or a place to hide"

The Rocky Mountains are obviously referred to quite often as 'The Great Divide' I think this is what Don Henley means.
It talks about how happy the people are there, how they live off the land in 'the red man[indians']'s ways.
There were people arriving to this wilderness from all walks of life to escape.

"Can't wait to tell you all,
what it's like up there
And they called it paradise"

This part, the main character is saying she can't wait to write back to her family about how awesome it is "up there" (up there obviously being in the Rocky Mountains)

"I don't know why
Somebody laid the mountains low
while the town got high"

"The towns got their 'high'" off the beauty of the mountains and the serene feel of the whole place.

"Then the chilly winds blew down
Across the desert
through the canyons of the coast, to
the Malibu
Where the pretty people play,
hungry for power
to light their neon way
and give them things to do"

The chilly winds of the Rockies blew west to California, and the rich pretty people living there were just looking for things to do-
-completely ignorant of the happiness and contentment that was achieved by those living in nature in the Rockies.

"Some rich men came and raped the land,
Nobody caught 'em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus,
people bought 'em"

Rich guys came in and built hotels and lodges and Theme Parks and exploited the beauty of the land so they could make more money. The part that says "Jesus
People bought 'em"
I believe is not literally mentioning Jesus as He is, but rather using the name in vain. Eg. "Jesus, what have you done Bill?!"

"And they called it paradise
The place to be
They watched the hazy sun, sinking in the sea"

The white men who raped the land and put up a bunch of attractions for people to come in advertised it as paradise. I'm not quite sure what the reference to "the sun sinking in the sea" is about, because obviously there is no sea around the Rocky Mountains. However, the sun does sink in the west which means from atop the Rocky Mountains it would appear to be sinking off into the Pacific coast.

"You can leave it all behind
and sail to Lahaina
just like the missionaries did, so many years ago
They even brought a neon sign: "Jesus is coming"
Brought the white man's burden down
Brought the white man's reign"

I believe Laihana is referring to the city in Hawaii (on the island of Maui)
In this part of the song, Don Henley is basically saying you can leave everything and escape to Hawaii living off the land as well, but "the man" has infiltrated purity of nature there as well. Missionaries already came in and forced their ways upon Hawaiians.

"Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?
'Cause there is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here"

^THAT is probably my favorite section of the song. "Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?" is basically calling attention to the fact that people have no God-given right to OWN land. "'Cause there is no more new frontier
We have to make it here" -This means that if we allow "The Man" to take over and exploit The Rocky Mountains, there will be no more new frontier for us to explore in America for the most part. This line points out the importance of mankind preserving nature to always allow us to have a place to escape to where things are always new and changing.

"We satisfy our endless needs and
justify our bloody deeds,
in the name of destiny and the name of God"

Although it may feel good at the time to juice all we can out of the land, in the end we will regret it and we will be needing a place to escape to. Man has attempted to justify his infestation of the western United States by coining the term 'manifest destiny' and by missionaries telling themselves God wanted them to go in and take over those areas.

"And you can see them there,
On Sunday morning
They stand up and sing about
what it's like up there
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise,
kiss it goodbye"

Sunday mornings, people are on the Rocky Mountains singing to God the creator and thanking him so greatly for the majesty of his creations. They are loving the Rocky Mountains with all their hearts and call it their paradise, but they sit back and allow more people to come in and industrialize, commercialize, and destroy this last beautiful frontier of the United States.

If we don't change soon, we may as well kiss our paradise goodbye.

Floyd -- Good work, but a little overkill. The "hazy sun" is smog -- have you ever sat on a deck overlooking the Pacific in Malibu and watched the sun set?

As great as this song is, I appreciate how some are turned off by the typical Henley angry negativity. For a more enthusiastic view of "Manifest Destiny" (look it up) listen to Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy."

Floyd - I looked at your comments again, and need to say that it is not specifically about the Rockies -- the Rockies are only one stage in the westward expansion that has characterized the last couple of centuries. After the east, we spoiled Colorado, etc., and then moved on to California, ruined that, and are now messing up Hawaii. After that, there is no more "west." The Asians are busy spoiling that.

The song is about mankind's incredible ability to screw up "Paradise". The last verse "And you can see them there on Sunday morning" He's saying "when these people get to Heaven, they'll find a way to screw it up too".

I believe that you have to look at this song within the context of the entire album. Hotel California, as an album, flows with the concept of loss. It has this "you can't have your cake and eat it too" and "certain things, once lost, can never be brought back" theme to the entire album. As a bookend of the album (a position shared with the title track), it's like a recapitulation of the ideas previously stated, whereas the title track was more like the thesis statement.

I remember reading somewhere that Glenn Fry once said that most of the Eagles' love songs of the early and mid-seventies were actually critiques or lamentations of the music business. Much like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character said in Almost Famous, the industry was dying and the 1970s was witnessing the death rattle. I believe that this idea of the music business narrative from the 60s to what was the present at the release of the album is the story that Hotel California tells.

There are certain lines that reference this idea, such as "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" (referencing musicians trapped by their recording contracts that were written to trap them), "lines on the mirror, lines on their face" (an obvious drug reference that depicts the state of many rock musicians in the 70s, but also shows how the allure of the music business seemed glamorous at first but quickly aged you), and "call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye" (pretty self-explanatory in the light i'm trying to paint this), that give some backbone to this idea that it's about the music business. I believe this entire song is a metaphor for the story of popular music from the 1950s/60s to the late 1970s, and while it sheds light on some issues that the Eagles felt strongly about, those issues weren't necessarily the crux of the biscuit here.

Who knows, I might be wrong. However, given Don Henley's combined angst for most things unjust and his deep involvement at the time in an unjust industry, I don't think I'm wrong.

There is no more new frontier{America settled from East to west}We have got to make it here.Brilliant line!

Wow, wilderness? HOW HIGH ON TREES ARE YOU?

Put aside the meaning for a moment, my favorite thing about this song is how it builds up to the climax. Two times they start to the pinacle and then seemingly take a rest. It's almost as if we're supposed to use this as an intermission to consider our sins. The first time, to consider what we did to the mountains. ("Somebody laid the mountains low
while the town got high "). The second time to consider the Pacific Coast (the "hazy sun, sinking in the sea.")

Finally, they start the trip a third time. This time with the suggestion of further westward expansion to Hawaii. This time, however, the Eagles don't take the rest. No rest is appropriate because there is nowhere else to go from here. The third time is a constant crescendo. The music intensifies as more instruments are added. The lyrics intensify and certainly Henley's singing intensifies. This time, the Eagles finish the story with the moral (the last two lyrics).

Put down the lyrics and just close your eyes. The message will wash over you in the music and instrumentation as well as the lyrics.

I think this song is generally means that the people is looking for a more social place as described in the song "seeking a place to stand or a place to hide" but however they can't find what they are looking for since the rich men raped the land, and everything developed, "somebody laid the moutain low while the town got high" and the air is polluted everywhere

First of all, I don't think this song is a bash on Christianity itself, but rather on the forms that people sometimes give that religion. People tend to use religion to justify their actions even when the religion doesn't say anything about their actions. Take extremist Muslims in the Middle East right now. Does their religion really call for Jihads or Holy Wars against all unbeleivers, or is it a peaceful religion like so many say it is? Are they using their religion as an excuse to get what they want? When greed takes over and people submit to it and commit sins because of it, they tend to turn to their religion to try to justify their actions and make themselves feel better - Manifest Destiny, which is what this song is all about. People were trying to justify destroying the land and the native peoples and their cultures, and they turned to their religion - Christianity - for that justification.

"Some rich men came and raped the land,
Nobody caught 'em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus,
people bought 'em"

When I first heard this song, I wondered if it was maybe "...Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and, Jesus,
people bought 'im [Him]", as in, they build houses and offices and whatnot, and then people bought into Jesus and Christianity as a way to justify these crimes against the earth. But I also like the earlier poster's thoughts about "Jesus people" - Christians. Take it for what you will.

As far as the "call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye" line, I belive that refers to the fact that the beauty of the Old West, and of Hawaii, was the fact that it was wide open, undeveloped, and pure. Paradise. It was so beautiful, in fact, that everyone who went out there wanted their families and friends to come see it, too, but the influx of people to the region destroyed the things that had made it beatiful in the first place. Once you tell people just how naturally beautiful a place is (you "call it paradise"), everyone will want to see that natural beauty, which will be destroyed by the sheer number of new inhabitants.

This same series of events is still being played out today in many of our National Parks and other places of natural beauty. We are loving them to death. If you've ever been to Yosemite or to Sedona (in Arizona), you'll know what I mean. So many people want to experience the solitude and unblemished beauty of these places that they are unintentionally destroying the very features they came to see. Once you call a place paradise, you can kiss goodbye the features that made is so attractive to begin with. And then the solitude-seekers keep pushing on to new areas, and then the secret gets out about the new areas, and everyone wants to see just how primitively beautiful these new places are, and the influx begins, and the cycle continues until there are no new places to turn to - "there is no more new frontier/we have to make it here".

I think the opening lines are about Anne Hutchinson , Anne Hutchinson (July 20, 1591 – August 20, 1643) was the unauthorized Puritan minister of a dissident church discussion group and a pioneer settler in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Netherlands. Her brilliant mind and kindness won admiration and a following. Hutchinson held Bible meetings for women that soon had great appeal to men as well. Eventually, she went beyond Bible study to proclaiming boldly facets of her own theological interpretations of the ministers sermons of that day, some of which offended colony leadership. Great controversy ensued, and after an arduous trial before a jury of officials from both government and clergy, eventually she was banished from her colony.[1]

She is a key figure in the study of the development of religious freedom in England's American colonies and the history of women in ministry. The state of Massachusetts honors her with a State House monument calling her a "courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration."In front of the State House in Boston, Massachusetts, a statue stands of Anne Hutchinson The inscription on the marble pediment of the statue reads:

IN MEMORY OF

ANNE MARBURY HUTCHINSON

BAPTIZED AT ALFORD

LINCOLNSHIRE ENGLAND

20 JULY 1595 (sic)

KILLED BY THE INDIANS

AT EAST CHESTER NEW YORK 1643

COURAGEOUS EXPONENT

OF CIVIL LIBERTY

AND RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

(elizabetta11 - but who wants 7+ minutes of feeling bad?)

I do.



I love this song. Don's vocals are amazing. He does this especially well on HFO. The whole band does. Great song to end the album.

A couple of you guys were very very close... It was not the President of Pepperdine, but the Chancellor. If you search news on Google, you will find tons of stories about it:

Charges Filed Against Young in Auto Deaths Sep 22, 1975

Felony manslaughter and drunk driving charges were filed today against Pepperdine University Chancellor M. Norvel Young in the aftermath of an auto collision which took the lives of two women and seriously injured another.

The land that Pepperdine was built on in Malibu was owned by an Indian tribe, the school is church of Christ, the neon sign is the big neon cross on the front law and the ugly boxes are the dorms.

When I was a freshman there in 1978, the story was that Chancellor Young had killed one of the kids of one of the Eagles. I have heard different variations since, but this is the incident that inspired the song.

IT'S ABOUT IMPERIALISM AND HOW THE SETTLERS USED "MANIFEST DESTINY" TO EXPAND THE UNITED STATES FROM COAST TO COAST.

"SHE" IS AMERICA. providence being VERY east.

This song is not an attack on Christianity or the Church, this song is about people that say one thing while doing something completely opposite. A true Christian will not exploit or abuse,The song in general is warning against hypocrisy. Jesus told us "People Will be known by their fruits" so those that "claimed" to be Christian while doing things like raping and pillaging were obviously not true Christians.

True Christians Live by Jesus' Words,Loving their neighbor, not abusing them or exploiting them for personal gain. I am Christian, and I Live my faith....for those that abuse the faith, God will be their judge.

being a Christian includes looking after God's creation, not ruin them. being a Christian is experiencing heaven on Earth, loving its beauty, and not altering it with what we think it should be... being a Christian is certainly not just going to Church every Sunday morning but a daily commitment to be fair, just, loving, caring, etc...

that's what this song is telling me... peace !

Shools and franklyb are correct, the Eagles incorporated the story of Norvel Young's drunk driving arrest and acquittal into the song. Rumor was that one of the members of the band had a relationship with one of the women who was killed. "They put up ugly boxes and Jesus-people bought 'em" refers the the buildings on the Pepperdine campus which are low, flat-roofed, white, adobe-style buildings that look like boxes. Note, there is no neon sign at Pepperdine. That was at Biola college, another Christian college in the Los Angeles area, that used to have a neon sign that read, "Jesus Saves". The Eagles are using artistic license there when they mention the neon sign that says "Jesus is coming".

While aspects of the Young incident are mentioned in the song, I don't believe it's merely about that, but about the contradiction of Christian values and the many negative things done in the name of religion and manifest destiny. The Young incident is just a very stark example of that kind of hypocrisy, "We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and the name of God".

Also, they are talking about the environment and preserving nature. Many people may not be aware, but Malibu was primarily a rural area with tremendous natural beauty until the 70's. The celebrity enclave that is associated with it is a small, isolated community. Since then, it has been heavily developed and Pepperdine was one of the first large developments. There was much animosity from the local population towards the University when it was first built.

A lot of people have written a lot of nonsense here and very few seem to have gotten the simple meaning behind the song.. I know everyone has their own interpretation of it and I respect that but it isn't so complicated or obscure that it leaves so much room for such vastly varying views. some comments are so zealous and full of biblical references I find it quite laughable.


(my interpretation) I think the song makes many references to different periods in American history, from the early pilgrims in the 15th century 'just like her father did across the sea' to manifest destiny. For those who don't know what that is, basically it's the drive eastwards and colonization of Indian lands, etc.


There are biblical/religious references here as with the word providence and even the term manifest destiny which was meant as God's plan.. our destiny is manifest.. etc.


The references to the ugly boxes could be to many specific developments in the west, but it generally means that people tore down mountains to put up ugly boxes (houses/flats/apartments/whatever) and people bought em' and called it paradise.. the irony is what is important here.


Rich men raping the land is nothing new, people hungry for power, lighting up the way with neon could refer to LV, NV or LA.. most places on the West Coast really and seems a repetitive timeless occurrence.


The final parts are the best.. there is no more new frontier.. meaning we have nowhere left to go.. we have raped the land and come out on the other side (West Coast).. now we must make it here.. but what's yours and what's mine? Taking what is others was God's Plan "Grand design" but now what? ok, that might be stretching it, but a poignant point of discussion.


There are many references to the hypocrisy of religion and religious people in this song.. from missionaries carrying neon signs to justifying bloody deeds in the name of God.. this song is all about greed and hypocrisy and the destruction of people and land in our quest for power and priviledge I guess.


my fav. part is the last.. how these fucken hypocrites after all this stands up in church on Sunday mornings and sing about heaven (paradise) and Don's point is that, 'you call it paradise, you might as well kiss it goodbye' since that's what they've done to this beautiful virgin planet.. raped the natural beauty and put up strips and malls and other crap made of metal and brick and call it paradise strip or something.. be hilarious if it wasn't so sad..


that's the meaning of this song kids..

I like the crescendo at the end and when he refers to them singing on Sunday morning, the backing vocals sound like a choir.