Them Bones
by Alice in Chains
- 82
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 16
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
Jerry Cantrell wrote "Them Bones" around a chromatic riff in an odd time signature. It settles into four only for the chorus. He told Guitar World that he did not know where the off-time feeling came from. It came naturally, and he liked how it surprised listeners, especially when something slows down and then slams into the dash.
The lyrics came from thinking about mortality. Cantrell said that one of these days everyone ends up a pile of bones, and that the thought that all experience ends when a person does scares him. He had lost family members young, and the song was meant to put the fear to rest: use what is left and use it well.
Columbia Records sent it to US radio on September 14, 1992, as the second single from Dirt. It reached number 24 on the Mainstream Rock chart and number 30 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and in the UK it reached number 26. Rocky Schenck's video places Alice in Chains in a huge dirt hole, with Layne Staley singing in a puddle where animals fight and a child is born, matching the line "Some say we're born into the grave". On Beavis and Butt-Head in 1993, Butt-head called it the coolest video he had ever seen.
Them Bones runs at 82 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.93 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 732 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.