Kryptonite
by 3 Doors Down
- 198
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
"Kryptonite" began as a demo for local play on 97.9 WCPR-FM in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the station's listeners requested it more than any other song for over 15 weeks. Several other radio stations picked it up in November and December 1999. The program director sent it to manager Phin Daly, who showed it to his employer at In De Goot Entertainment. The band was booked to perform at CBGB in New York. Daly said the magic was apparent when they started playing, and they moved to sign them.
It went to radio officially as the debut single on January 18, 2000. It was No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for nine weeks and on the Modern Rock Tracks chart for 11, the most successful song of 2000 on both. It reached No. 3 on the Hot 100, the band's highest-charting single in the United States.
Brad Arnold wrote it in a mathematics class at 15, one of the first songs he wrote. He said it asks whether someone will still be there when things go well, not only when they fall. Dean Karr directed the video, about an elderly former 1950s TV action hero. It was filmed in March 2000, partly at the Cowboy Palace Saloon in Los Angeles.
Kryptonite runs at 198 BPM, the tempo of speedcore, blast-beat metal and very fast hardcore. In classical terms it sits in presto territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.21 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 303 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.