My Generation
by The Who
- 99
- BPM
- Db major
- Key
- 3B
- Camelot
- 23
- Danceability
- 15
- Acousticness
Pete Townshend reportedly wrote "My Generation" on a train. One story says the Queen Mother, offended by Townshend's 1935 Packard hearse on a Belgravia street, had it towed away. That set him off. Townshend also credited Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues": "Without Mose I wouldn't have written 'My Generation'." He later said that when he wrote the line "I hope I die before I get old", "old" meant "very rich". Roger Daltrey sneered it on the record.
The Who released it as a single on October 29, 1965. It reached number two in the United Kingdom and number 74 in the United States. The bass solo was played by John Entwistle on a Fender Jazz Bass. He had wanted a Danelectro, but after buying three with rare thin strings that kept breaking, he used the Fender with nylon tapewound strings and had to simplify the solo. The song ends in spurts of guitar feedback from Townshend's Rickenbacker rather than a clean finish.
On stage the song became the basis for a medley of up to fifteen minutes, as the version on Live at Leeds shows. A short 1966 re-recording swapped the feedback ending for a chaotic run through Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory".
My Generation runs at 99 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 606 ms. It is in Db major, Camelot 3B, which shares its notes with Bb minor and mixes cleanly with F# major and Ab major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.