Sex on Fire
by Kings of Leon
- 152
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Caleb Followill wrote "Sex on Fire" about his then-girlfriend, the model Lily Aldridge, whom he later married. He first thought the song was terrible, and Spin reported it was nearly dropped during recording. Nathan Followill said the band never meant it to be about sex. The working title was "Set Us on Fire" until a sound mixer walked into the studio and said "Sex on Fire, huh?" It became a running joke. The name stuck.
Released on August 3, 2008, as the lead single from Only by the Night, it gave Kings of Leon their first number one in Australia, Finland, Ireland and the United Kingdom. In the UK it topped the chart on digital downloads alone, before the physical release. It spent 90 weeks on the UK chart in all, the third most of any single. It sold 1.2 million copies there by November 2012. It reached number 56 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.
At the 51st Grammy Awards it won Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. Triple J listeners voted it number one in their 2008 Hottest 100. Sophie Muller directed the video, which has the band in an abandoned factory and ends with smoke coming out of Caleb's mouth.
Sex on Fire runs at 152 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.58 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 395 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.