Behind Blue Eyes
by The Who
- 137
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 35
- Danceability
- 13
- Acousticness
Pete Townshend began "Behind Blue Eyes" after a Tommy tour concert in Denver on June 9, 1970. A groupie tempted him, but he went back to his room alone, perhaps because of the teachings of his spiritual leader, Meher Baba. There he started writing a prayer that began "When my fist clenches, crack it open." Those words later ended up in the rocking section of the song.
He wrote it for Lifehouse, the project he abandoned, as the theme for the villain, Jumbo, who thought he was a good guy but had been forced into a villain's role. The version on Who's Next was the second one the Who recorded. The first, made at the Record Plant in New York on March 18, 1971 with Al Kooper on Hammond organ, appeared as a bonus track on the 1995 CD reissue.
The band considered it for a UK single, but Townshend said it was too far out of character for the British market. It came out as a single only in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States, where "My Wife" was on the other side. In America it reached number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100. Limp Bizkit are among the artists who have covered it.
Behind Blue Eyes runs at 137 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.75 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 438 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.