Badlands
by Bruce Springsteen
- 122
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 61
- Danceability
- 9
- Acousticness
Bruce Springsteen had the title "Badlands" before he had the song. He thought it was a great title and feared blowing it with an unworthy song. The riff he built on comes from the Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood". At South by Southwest in 2012 he played the opening riffs of both songs back to back and said, "This is how successful theft is accomplished!"
The lyric took ideas from Elvis Presley's "King of the Whole Wide World", from the 1962 film Kid Galahad, for the line about a poor man wanting to be rich and a rich man wanting to be king. The narrator is a man down on his luck and angry at the world.
Max Weinberg's drumming carries the song, and the verses hold his best-known beat. Late on, a short guitar break leads into Clarence Clemons's tenor saxophone. Released in July 1978 as the second single from Darkness on the Edge of Town, it reached only number 42 on the Hot 100. It opened shows on the 1978 tour before the album was out. In concert it ranks fourth among his most played songs, after "Born to Run", "Thunder Road" and "The Promised Land".
Badlands runs at 122 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.97 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 492 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.