Love Hurts
by Nazareth
- 81
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 48
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Boudleaux Bryant, an American songwriter, wrote "Love Hurts", and the Everly Brothers first recorded it in July 1960. They never released it as a single. A falling out with their manager and publisher, Wesley Rose, prevented it, and only after the quarrel was settled in 1964 did they rerecord it for the 1965 album Rock 'n' Soul. Roy Orbison covered it in 1961 as the B-side to "Running Scared", and in Australia both sides peaked at number 5, which made his the first hit version.
The version most people know belongs to Nazareth, the Scottish hard rock band, who played it as a power ballad on their 1975 album Hair of the Dog. They changed one line, so that "love is like a stove" became "love is like a flame". It reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1976, the only version of the song to be a hit single in the United States, and Billboard ranked it the number 23 song of 1976.
Abroad it did better still. It reached number 1 in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa and Norway. In Norway it charted for 61 weeks, 14 of them at number 1, and became the top single of all time there. A later Nazareth recording with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra peaked at number 89 in Germany in 1994.
Love Hurts runs at 81 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.96 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 741 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.