C major · Camelot 8B · 75 BPM
Lean on Me
by Bill Withers
- 75
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 62
- Danceability
- 79
- Acousticness
Bill Withers wrote "Lean on Me" at a small piano he had bought, running his fingers up and down the keys until the phrase that gave the song its title crossed his mind. He liked the way the words "Lean on Me" sounded against the music, and he built the song around them. He said in an interview that he made a deliberate effort to keep the lyrics simple.
The song grew out of Withers's childhood in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a coal mining town where he had lived in a decrepit house in the poor section. After moving to Los Angeles, he found himself missing the strong community ethic of his hometown, and that feeling shaped the song he wrote for his second album, Still Bill. It was released in April 1972 as the lead single from that record.
The recording session in 1972 used several members of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, along with a string section. "Lean on Me" reached No. 1 on both the soul and Billboard Hot 100 charts, holding the top spot on the Hot 100 for three weeks in July 1972, and Billboard ranked it the No. 7 song of that year. In 1987, Club Nouveau took their cover version to No. 1 as well, making it one of only nine songs to top the Hot 100 with versions by two different artists. The 1972 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007.
Lean on Me runs at 75 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in largo territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.2 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 800 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.