Outshined
by Soundgarden
- 94
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 32
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Chris Cornell wrote the best-known line in "Outshined" while on tour, feeling low. He looked in the mirror, saw himself in a red T-shirt and baggy tennis shorts, and thought that however bad he felt, he looked like a beach kid. Out of that came "I'm looking California and feeling Minnesota". He thought it was the dumbest thing he had ever written. Then the record came out, and crowds screamed the line back at the band.
Cornell said the rest of the song came from swinging between extremes: periods of total self-confidence, then sudden collapse over something insignificant. The verses are in an unorthodox meter. Guitarist Kim Thayil called it "a total accident". The band recorded it in drop D tuning.
Released in 1991, it was the second single from Badmotorfinger and the first Soundgarden single to reach the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart, where it peaked at number 45. The video, set in a steel mill, got plenty of MTV airtime, but the band hated it. Thayil said the guitar solo had been cut to make it single-length and the clip never kicked in. ESPN's Stuart Scott borrowed "feeling Minnesota" to describe Kevin Garnett.
Outshined runs at 94 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.55 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 638 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.