Born in the U.S.A.
by Bruce Springsteen
- 123
- BPM
- B major
- Key
- 1B
- Camelot
- 40
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
The version of "Born in the U.S.A." that people know was cut on April 27, 1982, as take four at the Power Station, with the E Street Band. The band made up much of the arrangement on the spot. Roy Bittan's opening synthesizer riff, played on a Yamaha CS-80, came together that way, as did Max Weinberg's drumming, which producer Chuck Plotkin nicknamed "exploding drums".
The famous snare sound came from engineer Toby Scott, who ran the top snare microphone through a broken reverb plate with a fixed four-second decay and into a Kepex noise gate. The studio recording originally ended in a long jam, edited down for release.
Bruce Springsteen had written the song in 1981 as the title track for a film Paul Schrader was thinking about making. He recorded a solo acoustic demo on January 3, 1982, at his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey. His manager and producer Jon Landau and others felt the melody did not fit the lyrics, so the song was shelved. The demo surfaced in the late 1990s on Tracks and 18 Tracks. The full band version waited two years for the 1984 album, where it opened the record. As a single it reached number nine on the Hot 100 in January 1985.
Born in the U.S.A. runs at 123 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 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in B major, Camelot 1B, which shares its notes with Ab minor and mixes cleanly with E major and F# major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.