Life in the Fast Lane
by Eagles
- 109
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
The song began as a riff Joe Walsh played while the Eagles warmed up in rehearsal. Glenn Frey told him to keep it. Don Henley remembered asking what the hell it was and saying they had to figure out how to make a song of it. Henley and Frey, the band's main lyricists, then wrote the words.
The title came from Frey riding on the freeway with a drug dealer known as "The Count". Frey asked him to slow down. The dealer said, "What do you mean? It's life in the fast lane!" The lyric tells of a couple taking their excessive lifestyle to the edge.
Walsh, Frey and Henley wrote "Life in the Fast Lane" for Hotel California in 1976. It was the album's third single and peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Billboard ranked it fourth on its 2017 list of the 15 greatest Eagles songs, and Rolling Stone put it at eighth on its 2019 list of 40.
Life in the Fast Lane runs at 109 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.2 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 550 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.