Hey You
by Pink Floyd
- 112
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 13
- Acousticness
For "Hey You" on The Wall, the album's chief audio engineer James Guthrie needed the sound of worms eating into a brain. He made it from the faint sound of a hand-held power drill boring into some material. Pink Floyd's 1979 track also carried a sonar-like ping at about 3:23, similar to the one in "Echoes".
The song began with an acoustic guitar restrung in a way close to Nashville tuning, with the low E replaced by a high E two octaves up. David Gilmour played it and also took the fretless bass in place of Roger Waters, the usual bassist. Richard Wright added Fender Rhodes electric piano, and Gilmour sang the early verses as Pink in the first person. After the guitar solo, Waters took over and sang in a narrative role, one octave higher than Gilmour in the last verse.
In the story of The Wall, Pink realizes his mistake in shunning society and tries to reach the outside world, but cannot see or hear beyond the wall. The sequence was shot for the 1982 film and cut to keep it from running too long. A rough black and white workprint appears on the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD. The song was also the B-side to "Comfortably Numb" in June 1980.
Hey You runs at 112 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.14 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 536 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.