Man on the Moon
by R.E.M.
- 118
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 42
- Acousticness
Michael Stipe wrote the words to "Man on the Moon" last, and not willingly. The rest of R.E.M. had written the music and recorded it with the rest of Automatic for the People in Seattle. Drummer Bill Berry had a single chord change he did not know what to do with, and Peter Buck finished the chorus and bridges. With the final week of sessions at hand, Stipe still had no lyric. He argued the track should be an instrumental, but his bandmates insisted.
He took the track on a walk around Seattle on a Walkman and came back inspired to write about the comedian Andy Kaufman. Stipe finished the vocal in the studio, and the track was mixed that night and sent for mastering the next day. The lyric strings together references to Kaufman's Elvis impersonation and his wrestling with Fred Blassie and Jerry Lawler. It also invokes Moon landing conspiracy theories. Stipe said the repeated "yeah" was meant to playfully upstage Kurt Cobain's heavy use of the word.
Warner Bros. released it on November 9, 1992. It reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 18 in the UK, and it went to number one in Iceland. Peter Care shot the black-and-white video in Lancaster, California.
Man on the Moon runs at 118 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.03 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 508 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.