Tom Sawyer
by Rush
- 87
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Rush spent a summer rehearsal vacation at Ronnie Hawkins' farm outside Toronto, and "Tom Sawyer" came out of it. Neil Peart was handed a poem called "Louis the Warrior" by Pye Dubois, a lyricist from the band Max Webster, and he modified and expanded it. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson helped set it to music. Peart said Dubois's original lyrics were a portrait of a modern-day rebel, and that he added the theme of reconciling the boy and the man in himself.
For the song Lee switched from his Rickenbacker 4001 to a Fender Jazz Bass he had bought at a pawn shop. Lifeson said he winged his solo: he did five takes, went off for a cigarette, and found he was at his best on the first two. The solo on the record is composed from various takes.
"Tom Sawyer" opened the 1981 album Moving Pictures. Lee has called it the band's defining piece from the early 1980s, and Drumeo has called it possibly the world's greatest air-drumming song of all time.
Tom Sawyer runs at 87 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 2.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 690 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.