Down in a Hole
by Alice in Chains
- 95
- BPM
- F# major
- Key
- 2B
- Camelot
- 56
- Danceability
- 9
- Acousticness
Alice in Chains released "Down in a Hole" as a single, yet never played it live until MTV Unplugged in 1996. That performance appeared on the Unplugged album and video. Another acoustic version, with William DuVall singing lead, was added as a bonus track to the Japanese edition of Black Gives Way to Blue.
Jerry Cantrell wrote the power ballad for his then-girlfriend, Courtney Clarke. He hesitated to show it to the band because he thought it was too soft, but they liked it and recorded it. Layne Staley and Cantrell harmonize throughout. Cantrell put it in his personal top three and said that in a strange way it foretold where he and Clarke were. This life was not suited to long-term relationships.
Columbia sent it to US radio on September 14, 1993, as the fifth single from Dirt. It peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart and spent 21 weeks there. Nigel Dick filmed the video on August 9, 1993, in the Johannesburg settlement in California, with the band walking through a desert. Dick remembered every moment as a nightmare. His one good memory was a 1964 Gibson acoustic guitar he bought in a pawn shop in Kansas City.
Down in a Hole runs at 95 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.53 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 632 ms. It is in F# major, Camelot 2B, which shares its notes with Eb minor and mixes cleanly with B major and Db major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.