The Waiting
by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 118
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
Tom Petty traced the title of "The Waiting" to Janis Joplin, who said of life on the road, "I love being onstage and everything else is just waiting." Roger McGuinn swore he had said something like it to Petty. Petty allowed that maybe he did, but thought the Joplin remark was where it stuck.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made it the lead single from Hard Promises in 1981. It reached number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the new Rock Tracks chart it went to number one and stayed there six straight weeks that summer.
The band was a Gainesville, Florida group formed in 1976, with Mike Campbell on lead guitar, Benmont Tench on keyboards, Stan Lynch on drums and Ron Blair on bass. In 1993 "The Waiting" came back as the B-side on the single-only release of "Mary Jane's Last Dance".
The Waiting runs at 118 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.03 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 508 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.