The Pretender
by Foo Fighters
- 172
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 44
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
"The Pretender" began as "Silver Heart", a song Dave Grohl brought up in pre-production for Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace that went nowhere. Producer Gil Norton said the chorus existed, but the verse and middle had not been written, and the song was much slower. Then came a 10-day break in the recording in April 2007. Grohl listened to the monitor mixes, decided the album needed another uptempo song, and spent the time reworking it. The band recorded a demo, Norton approved, and the song got a proper recording the next day. Grohl said the whole thing was written in a day, and that the Sesame Street song "One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)" may have crept into it without him noticing.
Mixing engineer Rich Costey found the dynamics hard to balance, and the many layered guitars in the same range made the mix dense.
It was the lead single from the album and reached number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the Modern Rock Tracks chart it spent 18 weeks at number one, a record at the time. It also won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2008.
The Pretender runs at 172 BPM, the tempo of drum and bass and jungle. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.4 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 349 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.