The Passenger
by Iggy Pop
- 136
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 50
- Danceability
- 9
- Acousticness
Iggy Pop recorded "The Passenger" at Hansa Studio by the Wall in West Berlin between May and June 1977. The lineup was Pop, guitarist Ricky Gardiner, David Bowie on piano, Carlos Alomar on guitar and the brothers Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Bowie, Pop and Colin Thurston produced the Lust for Life album under the name Bewlay Bros.
Gardiner wrote the music and Pop wrote the lyrics, mostly on the spot in the studio. Gardiner found the riff in early spring, wandering through a field beside an orchard with the trees in blossom. The words drew on a Jim Morrison poem that saw modern life as a journey by car, and on rides on the Berlin S-Bahn. Pop also said he had spent years riding around North America and Europe in Bowie's car, with no license or vehicle of his own.
RCA released the album on September 9, 1977 and put the song on the B-side of "Success" in October, where it failed to chart. His press officer Robin Eggar pushed for it as an A-side and was ignored. After a car commercial two decades later, Virgin issued it as a single in March 1998, and it reached number 22 in the UK. It got an official music video in 2020.
The Passenger runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.