Come Together
by The Beatles
- 83
- BPM
- D minor
- Key
- 7A
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 4
- Acousticness
In May 1969, during the Montreal bed-in with Yoko Ono, John Lennon had a visit from Timothy Leary, who was planning to run for Governor of California. Leary asked him for a campaign song built on the slogan "Come Together – Join the Party!" The result was a chant only a line long. Lennon promised to finish it. The two never interacted again.
In July, during sessions for Abbey Road, Lennon took the phrase and wrote a new song around it. He based it on Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" and barely changed Berry's line about a flattop. He borrowed "shoot me" from an unfinished song called "Watching Rainbows". The Beatles taped "Come Together" at EMI Studios on July 21, 1969. They made eight takes and picked the sixth, with Ringo Starr laying tea towels over his tom drums. Lennon added handclaps on each "Shoot me!", and Paul McCartney played a Fender Rhodes electric piano at his request.
Issued as a double A-side with "Something", it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and number four in the UK. It became the band's eighteenth American number one, passing Elvis Presley's seventeen.
Come Together runs at 83 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.89 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 723 ms. It is in D minor, Camelot 7A, which shares its notes with F major and mixes cleanly with G minor and A minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.