(Don't Fear) The Reaper
by Blue Öyster Cult
- 144
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 34
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser wrote "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" while thinking about what would happen if he died at a young age. The lead guitarist for Blue Öyster Cult, he also sang it. He used Romeo and Juliet as an example of a couple who wanted to be together in the afterlife. The line about them being together in eternity led many listeners to hear a murder-suicide pact. Roeser said he was appalled. He meant a plea not to fear death, and called it a love song where the love transcends the physical existence of the partners.
It came out in 1976 on the album Agents of Fortune, produced by David Lucas, Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman. The riff was recorded on Krugman's Gibson ES-175 through a Music Man 410 combo amplifier. The guitar solo and rhythm sections went down in one take. Engineer Shelly Yakus announced at the end of that take that the band had the groove. It took nearly as long to edit the five-minute track down as it did to record it. Bassist Joe Bouchard remembered the producer asking his brother, drummer Albert Bouchard, to play a cowbell. Albert thought that was crazy. Both David Lucas and Eric Bloom claim credit for the part.
The edited single reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1976 and stayed on the chart for 20 weeks. It was the band's highest-charting US song. In Canada it reached number 7.
(Don't Fear) The Reaper runs at 144 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.67 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 417 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.