L.A. Woman
by The Doors
- 170
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 36
- Danceability
- 8
- Acousticness
After the Doors finished recording "L.A. Woman", Jim Morrison wrote "Mr. Mojo Risin'" on a board and told the band to look at it. The letters rearranged into an anagram of his name. Drummer John Densmore knew mojo as a sexual term from the blues. That gave him the idea to play it slow and dark, then slowly speed it up.
The song was the title track of the Doors' 1971 album, the last with Morrison before his death on July 3 of that year. It has been read as his goodbye to Los Angeles before he moved to Paris. The lyrics drew on John Rechy's 1963 novel City of Night, and the title turns the city into a woman. A sheet of lined A4 paper with the lyrics in Morrison's handwriting sold at auction in Berkshire, England, on August 4, 2009, for 13,000 pounds.
Fourteen years after Morrison died, Ray Manzarek directed a music video for it and Rick Schmidlin produced. It aired on MTV and appeared in the film Dance on Fire. Robby Krieger has often named it the Doors song that best sums up the band.
L.A. Woman runs at 170 BPM, the tempo of drum and bass and jungle. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.41 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 353 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.