My Own Worst Enemy
by Lit
- 103
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 50
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Lit had formed more than a decade earlier in Southern California, where they swung between metal and punk. RCA Records then signed them and paid for A Place in the Sun. "My Own Worst Enemy" went to US radio in January 1999 as its lead single.
Guitarist Jeremy Popoff said the song came from waking up and realizing the night before had gone badly. Singer A. Jay Popoff said it combined many incidents. He sang it naked in the studio. The second verse, he said, came from New Year's in Laughlin, Nevada, where he stole a janitor's cart, rode it down the sidewalk with five friends, and was chased by police. The next day he learned security had been searching for him all night while he sat unaware in his hotel room.
The single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart on April 10 and was the top-played modern rock song of 1999. It went double platinum. Gavin Bowden filmed the video at Java Lanes bowling alley in Long Beach, and Lit played the song at Woodstock '99. People have wrongly credited it to Blink-182.
My Own Worst Enemy runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 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.