Misery Business
by Paramore
- 172
- BPM
- F minor
- Key
- 4A
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
When "Misery Business" came out, Paramore went on MTV's Discover and Download to explain what the band hoped its second album, Riot!, would become. The single debuted at number 99 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of June 25, 2007. It climbed to number 75 two weeks later, then dropped off. A burst of digital downloads in August brought it back at number 34, and it reached its peak of number 26 in the week of January 12, 2008. On the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart it got to number three.
The story behind the lyrics changed with the telling. Hayley Williams first said she wrote the song about a male friend she felt a girl was manipulating. She wanted to explain her side of the story. In 2013 she joked on Twitter that it was about London's Heathrow Airport. In May 2020 she told Vulture it was about bandmate Josh Farro, who had not liked her back when she was 13 or 14 and had a crush on him.
In September 2018 Williams announced at a concert that the song would be played "for the last time for a really long time". A second-verse line had been called sexist. She brought it back at the 2022 Coachella Festival in an acoustic version with Billie Eilish, and it returned to the setlist that fall without the line. In June 2022 it was certified six times platinum in the United States.
Misery Business runs at 172 BPM, the tempo of drum and bass and jungle. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.4 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 349 ms. It is in F minor, Camelot 4A, which shares its notes with Ab major and mixes cleanly with Bb minor and C minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.