Cold as Ice
by Foreigner
- 129
- BPM
- Eb minor
- Key
- 2A
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
Producer Gary Lyons and Ian McDonald spent a night at Atlantic Studios working on the vocals for "Cold as Ice." When they came out, a blizzard had covered New York. The radio said it was the coldest night on record there. McDonald took it as a good omen.
It was a late replacement. Lyons felt a song intended for Foreigner did not fit the album. Mick Jones went home, sat at his piano and found the riff for "Cold as Ice." He has said it was the first song he wrote and recorded on piano. Jones wrote it with Lou Gramm in 1977 for the band's debut album. It is about a stereotypical cold-hearted bad girl, the kind of woman Joan Crawford would play in a film, not anyone in particular, though one girl at school had dumped him. It was about minus 20 degrees in New York while they wrote it.
It was first the B-side on some versions of the "Feels Like the First Time" 45. The single is a few seconds shorter than the album version and adds horns and strings. The song peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Cold as Ice runs at 129 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 1.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 465 ms. It is in Eb minor, Camelot 2A, which shares its notes with F# major and mixes cleanly with Ab minor and Bb minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.