Limelight
by Rush
- 131
- BPM
- C# minor
- Key
- 12A
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Neil Peart wrote the lyrics to "Limelight," while Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson wrote the music. The words are about Peart's discomfort with Rush's success and the attention that came with it. They paraphrase the opening lines of the "All the world's a stage" speech from As You Like It, a phrase the band had used for its 1976 live album, and they mention "the camera eye," the title of the next song on Moving Pictures.
Lee said in 1988 that it was more Peart's song than most on the album. Peart was having the hardest time with autograph seekers and the sudden loss of privacy. Lifeson described the song as being about microscopic scrutiny and the need for privacy.
Lifeson played the solo on what he called a Hentor Sportscaster, a modified Fender Stratocaster fitted with a Floyd Rose vibrato arm. It is his favorite solo to play live. He finds something sad and lonely in it. The song came out as the lead single from Moving Pictures in February 1981. It charted at No. 4 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart and No. 55 on the Hot 100. On March 28, 2010, it was one of five Rush songs inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Limelight runs at 131 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.83 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 458 ms. It is in C# minor, Camelot 12A, which shares its notes with E major and mixes cleanly with F# minor and Ab minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.