Fell on Black Days
by Soundgarden
- 101
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 58
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
After "My Wave" appeared as a single in September 1994, A&M put out "Fell on Black Days" as the next one later that year. It stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart for twenty weeks, peaking at number 54 in its tenth, and it reached number four on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and number 13 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. It was the last single from Superunknown.
The video was filmed in October 1994 at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle with Brendan O'Brien producing the recording. Jake Scott directed the black-and-white clip of the band playing live in a studio. Later, television picked up the song: Supernatural used it twice, and The Vampire Diaries used it in an episode titled "Black Hole Sun", after another Soundgarden hit.
Chris Cornell wrote the song about a fear he had carried for years. He told the journalist Everett True it was a feeling everyone gets, when happy and with things going well, one suddenly realizes one is deeply unhappy and scared, with no event to pin it on. The riff is in six. Cornell said the drums stay completely straight, so it never feels quirky.
Fell on Black Days runs at 101 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.38 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 594 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.