Still of the Night
by Whitesnake
- 99
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 21
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
David Coverdale found the seed of "Still of the Night" after his mother died, while going through the things at her house. Among them were early demo cassettes, and one held a song he and Ritchie Blackmore had been working on, which he said was totally unrecognizable next to what it became. He took it as far as he could and then gave it to guitarist John Sykes in the south of France. Sykes put the big guitar hero stuff on it. Sykes hated blues. Coverdale worked within those limits, shaping the song into electric blues.
Whitesnake released it on March 2, 1987 through EMI Records and Geffen Records as the debut single from the album 1987. It peaked at number sixteen on the UK Singles Chart, number seventy-nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and number eighteen on the Mainstream Rock chart. The song drew comparisons with Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" and "Whole Lotta Love". Coverdale denied copying either, saying the structure came from "Jailhouse Rock" and the main riff from Jeff Beck's "Rice Pudding". Marty Callner directed the video, where Tawny Kitaen played the Whitesnake woman after a plan to cast Claudia Schiffer fell apart the night before the shoot. Of the band that recorded the song, only Coverdale appears in it.
Still of the Night runs at 99 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 606 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.