The Stroke
by Billy Squier
- 92
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 62
- Acousticness
Billy Squier wrote "The Stroke" himself. It was the first single from his 1981 album Don't Say No, which went triple platinum. The single reached number 17 on the Hot 100 and number three on rock radio's Top Tracks chart, a bigger showing with rock stations than with pop ones.
Many listeners took the title as a sexual metaphor. The lyric points somewhere else: the music business stroking musicians' egos so they keep playing the game. Squier was an American rock singer and songwriter, born William Haislip Squier in 1950. Don't Say No stayed his best-selling album.
In the UK "The Stroke" was his only single release, and it got to number 52. In 1998 he went back to it for Happy Blue, with an acoustic blues take called "Stroke Me Blues". Squier's best run came between 1981 and 1984, when he had five Top 10 Mainstream Rock hits, two of them number ones, and videos on MTV. VH1 later named "The Stroke" the 59th best hard rock song of all time.
The Stroke runs at 92 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.61 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 652 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.