Run to You
by Bryan Adams
- 129
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 57
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Bryan Adams came back from a tour in Asia and went straight into making Reckless. "Run to You" was the last song written for it, though it was older than that. Adams and Jim Vallance had finished it on January 10, 1983. They first aimed it at Blue Öyster Cult, who turned it down. .38 Special passed on it too.
The riff came from Adams jamming on his guitar. He never took it seriously. His demo carried a "really silly" background vocal part that buried the riff. Recording began on March 27, 1984, at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver. Once the full band played it together, Adams said it was like hearing the song for the first time. That first take is the one on the album. Vallance mixed it in New York on September 21.
A&M released it as the lead single on October 18, 1984. It was Adams's first number one on the Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart, where it stayed four weeks. On the Hot 100 it reached number six. In Canada it peaked at number four and earned a Juno nomination for song of the year. The lyric is a man's vow to keep running to his mistress. In the video, directed by Steve Barron, the object of desire is Adams's guitar.
Run to You runs at 129 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 465 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.