Heroin
by The Velvet Underground
- 146
- BPM
- Db major
- Key
- 3B
- Camelot
- 20
- Danceability
- 27
- Acousticness
Lou Reed wrote "Heroin" in 1964, while working as a songwriter for Pickwick Records, a budget label that mostly made inexpensive sound-alikes. The company locked him in a room and told him to write ten surfing songs. He wrote "Heroin" and told them he had something, and they said it would never happen. His earliest solo demo, from May 1965, was mailed to himself and rediscovered in 2022 by his widow Laurie Anderson.
The Velvet Underground recorded it twice for their 1967 debut. The first take came at Scepter Studios in New York in April 1966, faster and about a minute shorter, with Reed singing "I know just where I'm going". The album version was redone at TTG Studios in Hollywood and ran 7 minutes and 12 seconds. It started with Reed's quiet guitar, Sterling Morrison's rhythm guitar and Maureen Tucker's drums, joined by John Cale's droning viola, and built to a crescendo of bow scratching and feedback. There was no bass part.
At 5:17 Tucker stopped drumming for several seconds because she could not hear anyone over the noise, expecting the others to stop too. Nobody did. She came back in. Fans sometimes told band members they had shot up to the song. That disturbed Reed.
Heroin runs at 146 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.64 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 411 ms. It is in Db major, Camelot 3B, which shares its notes with Bb minor and mixes cleanly with F# major and Ab major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.