She Hates Me
by Puddle of Mudd
- 109
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 58
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
After it was released as the fourth and final single from Come Clean on July 29, 2002, "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd became their second single to sell more than 500,000 copies in the United States, after "Blurry". It peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent one week at the top of the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in October. In the UK it reached number 14, and it won an ASCAP Pop Music Award in 2004.
Lead guitarist Jimmy Allen wrote it right after ending a relationship. He was trying to capture his ex-girlfriend's anger. The upbeat music sits against lyrics about the break-up. The handwritten lyrics photocopied in the album insert show the original title, which had a profanity in the middle, and the line survives in the unedited version of the song.
The chord progression resembles Suicidal Tendencies' 1983 song "I Saw Your Mommy". Plagiarism accusations followed. It also shares chords and melodies with "Summer Nights" from the 1971 musical Grease, and the band has sometimes played the two as a medley. Marc Webb directed the video, in which band and crew members lip sync as characters such as a janitor and a fast food cook who grow more violent as the music gets louder.
She Hates Me runs at 109 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.2 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 550 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.