Livin' Thing
by Electric Light Orchestra
- 122
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 58
- Acousticness
Patti Quatro sang on "Livin' Thing" without a credit, handling the "higher and higher" parts. The song was written by Jeff Lynne for Electric Light Orchestra and appeared on their 1976 album A New World Record. When it came out as a single, the flip side was "Fire On High". It became the band's most popular instrumental.
Lynne built the chorus around a G augmented chord. Without it, he said, the chorus would have run through a plain C, A minor, F and G, but he swapped in D minor, G augmented and a return to C. He traced the taste for such chords to the old Long Wave songs he heard early on, and to George Harrison, who used them too. He called the chord a bit of tension and uplift, one that nobody knew how to play.
The record opened with a mock-Spanish orchestral flourish and then swung into a mid-tempo rocker driven by acoustic rhythm guitars. Lynne's falsetto carried the chorus, backed by a string section pushed further forward than usual. In August 2006 the UK magazine Q named it the number 1 guilty pleasure single of all time.
Livin' Thing runs at 122 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.97 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 492 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.