Every Rose Has Its Thorn
by Poison
- 70
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 16
- Acousticness
Bret Michaels was in a laundromat in Dallas, waiting for his clothes to dry, when he called his girlfriend from a pay phone. He heard a male voice in the background and was devastated. He told VH1's Behind the Music he wrote "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" as a result.
Poison released the power ballad in October 1988 as the third single from Open Up and Say... Ahh!. It was the band's only No. 1 hit in the US, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks from December 24, 1988. It also peaked at No. 11 on the Mainstream Rock chart and No. 13 on the UK Singles chart.
Marty Callner directed the video, which opens with a forlorn Michaels in bed with a young woman, both of them unhappy. He lets out the heavy sigh heard at the start of the song and walks off to play an acoustic guitar. The video cuts to clips from the band's tour. The same young woman is seen twice driving a Thunderbird in the rain, listening to the song on the car radio. It was shot at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and in an empty warehouse nearby.
Every Rose Has Its Thorn runs at 70 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in largo territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.43 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 857 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.