The Weight
by The Band
- 143
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 63
- Danceability
- 23
- Acousticness
Robbie Robertson wrote "The Weight" while strumming idly on his 1951 Martin D-28. He noticed a stamp inside the guitar saying it was made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where C. F. Martin & Company is based. He started writing lyrics as he played. The song follows a traveler who arrives in a town called Nazareth, where his friend Fanny has asked him to look up some people. Each visit loads him with more favors, until the weight of them sends him back to Fanny.
The characters came from real people. Fanny was based on Frances "Fanny" Steloff, who founded a New York City bookstore where Robertson read Luis Buñuel scripts. Levon Helm said Carmen came from his hometown of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, and young Anna Lee was his friend Anna Lee Amsden. Crazy Chester was an eccentric resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who carried a cap gun.
The Band put it out as a single in 1968, and on Music from Big Pink, their first release under that name after Canadian Squires and Levon and the Hawks. In the US it peaked at only number 63. It debuted on KHJ's Boss 30 six days after release and peaked at number 3 there. It reached number 35 in Canada and number 21 in the UK.
The Weight runs at 143 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.68 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 420 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.