Plug In Baby
by Muse
- 136
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 41
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
In September 2001 Muse spent a few days at Long View Farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, recording a new version of "Plug In Baby". Their US label, Maverick, wanted Matt Bellamy to tone down his falsetto on the song and the whole album. The band were unhappy with the result. Maverick dropped Muse in the US. Origin of Symmetry did not come out there until 2005.
The song was the lead single from the album, released in Japan on February 28, 2001, and in the UK on March 12. It reached number 11 on the UK Singles Chart, the band's highest until "Time Is Running Out" hit number 8 in 2003. A 1997 studio demo already had similar lyrics and structure but lacked the main riff.
The riff is based on the harmonic minor scale. Its opening resembles the toccata from Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" and the start of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings". Readers of Total Guitar voted it the best guitar riff of the 2000s. One of the single's B-sides, "Execution Commentary", is what Bellamy called the worst song he had ever written. The song appeared in Guitar Hero 5 and Rocksmith.
Plug In Baby runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.