Dream Police
by Cheap Trick
- 136
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 48
- Danceability
- 4
- Acousticness
Rick Nielsen wrote "Dream Police" as an attempt to take a heavy thought, a quick bit of REM snatched right before waking up, and put it into a pop format. He also said the song was about Big Brother watching. Cheap Trick, the band he played guitar in, released it in 1979 as the first track on the album Dream Police. The single peaked at number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The B-side was "Heaven Tonight", which had already come out as the title track of the group's 1978 album. Nielsen wrote that one with bassist Tom Petersson. It was one of two songs on that record that involved death. Its danger comes from drug abuse. Nielsen described it as an anti-drug song. He played mandocello on it, with harpsichord and cello alongside. Petersson said they tried to make it sound like Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", and the closing line, "you can never come down", was taken from a Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies song.
The band had formed in Rockford, Illinois, in 1973. The album Dream Police became its most commercially successful studio release and reached number 6 on the Billboard 200.
Dream Police runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.