Rock of Ages
by Def Leppard
- 108
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 64
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Def Leppard were at a recording studio when Joe Elliott found a hymn book left behind by a member of a children's choir that had just used the room. He saw the words "Rock of Ages" in it. They prompted him to write the lyrics. The song came out on the 1983 album Pyromania.
It starts with a count-in of "Günter glieben glauten globen", a German-like nonsense phrase introduced by producer Mutt Lange, who is of German descent. It means nothing in particular, though the band sometimes jokes that it means running through the forest silently. Lange said it during the recordings instead of the regular one, two, three, four. The Offspring later sampled it at the start of their 1998 song "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)". As the melody begins, Elliott speaks a line about it being better to burn out than to fade away, which refers to Neil Young's "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)".
As a US single it reached #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Top Tracks Rock chart. The video was directed by David Mallet and shot in Battersea, London, on December 8, 1982, guitarist Phil Collen's 25th birthday. Peter Mensch, a former co-manager, appears in it as one of the monks.
Rock of Ages runs at 108 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.22 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 556 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.