It's Been Awhile
by Staind
- 117
- BPM
- F# major
- Key
- 2B
- Camelot
- 51
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Aaron Lewis wrote "It's Been Awhile" around 1996, alongside "Outside," just before Dysfunction came out. He performed it with J-CAT, a short-lived acoustic side project, then shelved it until 2000, when Staind was recording Break the Cycle.
Released on March 27, 2001, as that album's lead single, it became the band's biggest hit. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 2001 and held No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart for a then-record 16 weeks. On the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart it spent 20 weeks at No. 1, second only to "Loser" by 3 Doors Down. It went eight-times platinum in the United States, topped the airplay chart in Canada and entered the top 20 in Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst directed the video, which premiered on MTV's Total Request Live on April 13, 2001. Lewis goes through old photographs, one of his wife, and writes her a letter while the band plays in a room full of candles. He smokes throughout, and at the end one cigarette falls on the floor and burns down his apartment.
It's Been Awhile runs at 117 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.05 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 513 ms. It is in F# major, Camelot 2B, which shares its notes with Eb minor and mixes cleanly with B major and Db major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.