Comfortably Numb
by Pink Floyd
- 139
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
Roger Waters wrote the lyrics to "Comfortably Numb" after a bad night in 1977. Before a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum on Pink Floyd's In the Flesh Tour, he was injected with tranquilizers for stomach cramps. "That was the longest two hours of my life," he said, "trying to do a show when you can hardly lift your arm." The working title was "The Doctor", and producer Bob Ezrin said the finished lyrics "just gave me goosebumps".
The music began as a wordless demo that David Gilmour recorded in 1978 while he was working on his debut solo album. He did not use it there, and Ezrin later picked it up. Waters asked Gilmour for extra bars in the chorus so he could fit in the line "I have become Comfortably Numb". Waters sang the verses and Gilmour sang the chorus.
The two argued during recording. Waters wanted an orchestral arrangement and Gilmour preferred something stripped down. They settled by combining both. The song appeared on The Wall in 1979 and came out as a single in 1980 with "Hey You" as the B-side. Gilmour said it was the last time he and Waters were able to work together constructively.
Comfortably Numb runs at 139 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.73 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 432 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.