Juke Box Hero
by Foreigner
- 89
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 36
- Danceability
- 9
- Acousticness
"Juke Box Hero" first entered the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in July 1981 and eventually reached #3. Foreigner released it as the third single from the album 4 in early 1982. It went to #26 on the Hot 100. The physical 45 sold fewer than 500,000 copies, but the RIAA has since certified the song platinum for over a million digital downloads. It also gave its name to the jukebox musical Jukebox Hero, built on Foreigner songs, which premiered in February 2019 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto.
Lou Gramm and Mick Jones wrote it from two separate ideas. Producer Mutt Lange helped them join. One was the Juke Box Hero section Jones had developed. The other was a Gramm idea called "Take One Guitar."
The story is about a boy who cannot buy a ticket to a sold-out show. He hears one guitar from outside, buys a guitar of his own and learns to play. Jones told Songfacts it was inspired by a fan who stood outside an arena for about five hours in the rain. Jones took him backstage. Gramm said in 2016 that the song was about himself waiting outside the Rochester War Memorial to see Jimi Hendrix, only to find the show sold out.
Juke Box Hero runs at 89 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.7 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 674 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.