Any Way You Want It
by Journey
- 138
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
For the studio version of "Any Way You Want It," keyboardist Gregg Rolie first used a Mellotron, but it was defective. Co-producer Geoff Workman fixed the sound by doubling it with Rolie's regular organ in the final mix. The result is the song's background sound.
The idea came from a tour. In July 1979 Journey were on the road across the United States with Thin Lizzy when Phil Lynott, Steve Perry and Neal Schon traded rhyme scheme exercises while hanging out in Miami. Perry said the guitar and voice interchange in Lynott's work shaped the song's give and take. He and Schon picked it up by instinct from spending time with him. Schon and Perry then reworked the song on the band bus, with Schon on acoustic guitar and Perry singing.
Perry and Schon wrote it, and it came out in February 1980 as the lead single from the sixth album, Departure. It peaked at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. Kim Paul Friedman directed the video, which premiered in March 1980. A man stands at a jukebox with his face hidden, and at the end he turns out to be Perry.
Any Way You Want It runs at 138 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.74 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 435 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.