E major · Camelot 12B · 116 BPM
Love Is a Long Road
by Tom Petty
- 116
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 64
- Danceability
- 5
- Acousticness
In 1989 Tom Petty stepped away from the Heartbreakers to record Full Moon Fever, his first solo album. One of its tracks, "Love Is a Long Road," was co-written by Heartbreakers lead guitarist Mike Campbell, who drew inspiration from a motorcycle he owned. "I was really into that frame of mind," Campbell said. "This feels like a motorcycle shifting gears." The resulting rock song looked back at a fractured romance, a theme Petty returned to more than once in his late-1980s work.
Although the song was never released as a stand-alone single, it appeared as the B-side to "Free Fallin'" in the UK and picked up a fair amount of radio airplay. In the United States it peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart. AllMusic called it one of the most powerful rockers on the album, hearing in it a stripped-down echo of the Who's classics "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again."
The song later turned up on the 1995 box set Playback and the 2000 compilation Anthology: Through the Years. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 38 in a ranking of Petty's 50 greatest songs. Interest surged again in 2023, when the track featured in the first trailer for the video game Grand Theft Auto VI. Spotify streams jumped by 36,979%, rising from less than 5 million to nearly 40 million in a few months.
Love Is a Long Road runs at 116 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.07 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 517 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.