Refugee
by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 116
- BPM
- F# minor
- Key
- 11A
- Camelot
- 58
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
The Heartbreakers cut "Refugee" something like a hundred times. Nothing felt right to Mike Campbell. Campbell was so frustrated one day that he walked out and left town for two days. He said it was the only time he did that. When the band regrouped, they got it on tape.
Campbell wrote the music first, one of the first songs he ever wrote, on a four-track at his house. He handed it to Tom Petty, who put words over it with no changes to the music. Petty also found a way to make the chorus lift without changing chords.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released "Refugee" in January 1980 as the second single from Damn the Torpedoes, which came out in 1979. It reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is in compound AABA form. Billboard put it at number 10 on its 2017 list of the 20 greatest Tom Petty songs, and Rolling Stone placed it second on its 2020 list of 50.
Refugee runs at 116 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.07 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 517 ms. It is in F# minor, Camelot 11A, which shares its notes with A major and mixes cleanly with B minor and C# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.