Shooting Star
by Bad Company
- 83
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 39
- Danceability
- 26
- Acousticness
By the mid-1970s rock had lost a string of young stars to overdoses, and Paul Rodgers wrote "Shooting Star" with that in mind. He named Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin among a catalog of people who did not make it and overdosed in their beds, and said that was the germ of the song. Jim Morrison was part of the same pattern. It appeared on Bad Company's 1975 album Straight Shooter and was never released as a single, yet it became a radio staple.
The lyrics follow a boy named Johnny who hears his first Beatles song, "Love Me Do," goes on to become a rock star, and dies after overdosing on whiskey and sleeping pills. The refrain says all the world will love him just as long as he is a shooting star. In 1997 drummer Simon Kirke called it a generic example of what can happen to people who meddle with drink and drugs, and said that as someone in a 12-step program he found it a daily reminder.
Bad Company re-recorded it for the 1996 album Stories Told & Untold, with Robert Hart singing lead in place of Rodgers and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi on guitar. It was in the 1994 film Clerks and in the game Rock Band 2. In 1999 Rodgers said that everybody has their moments as a shooting star, and that selling a trillion records or not, a person has to be true to themselves.
Shooting Star runs at 83 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.89 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 723 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.