Songs About Hotels

Home is where the heart is, but a hotel is where the heart goes when it needs a break. Or needs to escape. Or to find refuge after a breakup. Or to hide away in loneliness. Or to have a fling. Or to cut loose and have some fun. Hotels are a metaphor for life.

Chris Isaak’s Blue Hotel is one such metaphor. “Blue Hotel on a lonely highway,” he croons, with a resonant voice complemented by some great twangy guitar. Brook Benton also explores this theme, except his Hotel Loneliness turns into Hotel Happiness as he finds true love.

Rough Silk’s driving rocker has our protagonist dreaming he’s checked into a hell of a hotel – literally! Lucifer’s Hotel (Hang Over City)! But it’s really a trial run. The devil tells him: “I just wanted to invite you as a guest to kill your fear ’cos you live so carefully that you don’t dare to live at all.” He should cut loose and live a little, not suffocate in his “self-made prison cell”.

Grand hotels are not just venues to stay at while away from home. They often feature piano bars and ballrooms with live entertainment. One such was New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania in the 30s and 40s. Glenn Miller’s band played the Cafe Rouge there, and his classic Pennsylvania 6-5000 was inspired by the hotel’s phone number.

Romantic trysts? Ella Fitzgerald wants to spend some time with her man. There’s a Small Hotel where they can “creep into our little shell,” a “bridal suite … to share together”. Richard Hawley has had his troubles in the love department, as has his friend, both “lost out of love once again”. They escape to a Hotel Room and find solace in each other’s arms, with a hint that maybe something better’s beginning.

Of course, motels are notorious for hosting illicit relationships. Don Covay notes, to his horror and embarrassment, as “I Was Checkin’ Out, She Was Checkin’ In.” As the clerk gives his wife’s lover the keys, he observes that “the man gave him the same room” he had just shared with his girlfriend. Hoisted on his own petard!

You can escape your troubles in the solitude of the hotel, and Warren Zevon is drowning his sorrows as he reflects on his alcoholism in the deeply personal Desperados Under the Eaves. The ultimate despair sees Yoko Ono contemplating suicide. “Age 39,” she thinks, “Looking Over From My Hotel Window, wondering if one should jump off or go to sleep.” The line “show me your blood, John, and I’ll show you mine” made me wonder if it was written after Lennon was murdered. In fact, Ono recorded it eight years before her husband’s death.

Hotel workers were featured in a number of songs. Fischer-Z relates his encounter with Rosanna, the woman providing Room Service who speaks no English. Or does she? Billy Bragg and Wilco sing of a night clerk at the Hot Rod Hotel. His job includes cleaning up, but when some unruly guests leave “gobs of spit and condom rubbers on the windows, walls and doors” he quits in disgust.

There were a number of songs about itinerant musicians and a couple with historical references. Most notable among these is the Old Crow Medicine Show’s account of the murder of Martin Luther King at a Motel in Memphis.

But any list of songs about hotels would be incomplete without the most iconic hotel song of them all. The Eagles’ cryptic and haunting Hotel California is a fitting finale to this list with its fabulous two-minute guitar break, not sandwiched in the middle as most are, but at the end. A flashy end to the song and this playlist.

The playlist

1. Chris Isaak – Blue Hotel

2. Brook Benton – Hotel Happiness

3. Rough Silk – Lucifer’s Hotel (Hang Over City)

4. Glenn Miller – Pennsylvania 6-5000

5. Ella Fitzgerald – There’s a Small Hotel

6. Richard Hawley – Hotel Room

7. Don Covay – I Was Checkin’ Out, She Was Checkin’ In

8. Warren Zevon – Desperados Under the Eaves

9. Yoko Ono – Looking Over From My Hotel Window

10. Fischer-Z – Room Service

11. Billy Bragg and Wilco – Hot Rod Hotel

12. Old Crow Medicine Show – Motel in Memphis

13. Eagles – Hotel California

This column was originally published on The Guardian music blog on Jan. 15, 2015. For a complete index to all my essays, stories and poems on Vocal, click INDEX.