Lonely Boy
by The Black Keys
- 166
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 36
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney wrote "Lonely Boy" with the producer Danger Mouse. Auerbach said the guitar riff was inspired by Johnny Burnette's cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'". The song uses only three chords, and the dive bomb in the guitar line comes from a Boss Super Shifter pitch pedal.
It opens the Black Keys album El Camino and was released as its lead single on October 26, 2011. The cover shows a bulldozer on an empty lot where the factory that housed the recording of their 2004 album Rubber Factory once stood. Michael Carney, the band's art director, went to photograph the factory and found it had been demolished. The video was shot in one take. Derrick T. Tuggle, an actor and part-time security guard, dances and lip-syncs in front of the Pepper Tree Motel in North Hollywood. He had been cast as an extra, and his improvised dancing caught the director's eye. The first version, with a script and a cast of more than 40, was scrapped because the band hated it. The new video drew more than 400,000 YouTube views in 24 hours. Tuggle later appeared in Pharrell Williams' "Happy". The single reached number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in Australia. It won Grammys for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song.
Lonely Boy runs at 166 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.45 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 361 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
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