Jesus Built My Hotrod
by Ministry
- 125
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
The first Lollapalooza tour came to Chicago in the summer of 1991, and after the Butthole Surfers played, singer Gibby Haynes visited the Chicago Trax! studios. There, Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen asked him to record vocals for a song that had only guitar and drum parts. Haynes, alleged to be drunk, performed for some time before falling asleep.
Jourgensen then spent two or three weeks at home editing the tapes on a two-track recorder to make the performance somewhat listenable, adding instrumental parts, samples from drag racing competitions and tape noises. Around then, guitarist Mike Scaccia and drummer Bill Rieflin had recorded a demo of themselves playing as fast as they could, which became the B-side "TV Song". When Sire Records asked for new material, "Jesus Built My Hotrod" was the only song Jourgensen had. The label was irritated, but released it.
The American industrial metal band put it out on November 7, 1991, as the first single from Psalm 69, with promo copies accompanied by a free quart of motor oil. It reached number 19 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and had sold 128,000 copies by mid-July 1992. Jourgensen said in 2013 that it sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide.
Jesus Built My Hotrod runs at 125 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.92 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 480 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.