Lucky Man
by Emerson, Lake & Palmer
- 154
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 35
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
Greg Lake wrote "Lucky Man" when he was 12. His mother had bought him a guitar. The song was the first he ever wrote. In early 1968 he rehearsed it with King Crimson. Years later, when Emerson, Lake & Palmer needed one more song for their 1970 debut album, he played the version from his childhood. The other two members disliked it and thought it would not fit with the other tracks.
Lake then worked on it in the studio with Carl Palmer, adding bass, triple-tracked acoustic guitars, electric guitar and harmony vocals until it "sounded like a record." The lyrics tell of a man who had everything, went to war and died. Keith Emerson added a Moog synthesizer solo at the end, recorded in one take. It was one of the first rock songs to feature a Moog as a solo instrument.
Emerson was somewhat embarrassed by it. He said he was just jamming around, and was devastated to learn it would be used as recorded. All the tracks were taken. Years later he phoned Keyboard Magazine for a transcription of his own solo. He had forgotten how it went. The single came out in December 1970 and reached number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 14 in the Netherlands.
Lucky Man runs at 154 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.56 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 390 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.