Fly Away
by Lenny Kravitz
- 158
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
"Fly Away" began when Lenny Kravitz tested an amp that had been brought to the studio. After plugging in the available guitar, he started playing, and the next thing he knew he was telling the engineer to hook up the mics and record. He had already turned in his fifth album, 5, to Virgin Records and thought about making the song a B-side. A friend told him they would be furious if he left it off, so he contacted the label. It was reluctant. He sent it anyway. After hearing it, the label added it to the album.
It came out as the fourth single from 5, going to radio on May 11, 1998. In the United States it peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped both the Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock Tracks charts. It reached number one in Iceland and on the UK Singles Chart, the latter success attributed to its use in a television advertisement for the Peugeot 206.
Kravitz won the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Performance for it, the first of four consecutive wins in that category. Paul Hunter directed the video, which put Kravitz and his band in a crowded club, with special effects to make it look beat up and grainy.
Fly Away runs at 158 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.52 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 380 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.