Ab major · Camelot 4B · 129 BPM
Total Eclipse of the Heart
by Bonnie Tyler
- 129
- BPM
- Ab major
- Key
- 4B
- Camelot
- 44
- Danceability
- 35
- Acousticness
Jim Steinman gathered his own hand-picked band for the recording of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in 1982, with Rory Dodd singing the "Turn around..." refrain as a featured vocalist. Bonnie Tyler had first heard the song weeks after visiting Steinman's New York apartment, where he and Dodd performed it for her. She said she had shivers up her spine and couldn't wait to record it, later calling the song a challenge to sing because it needed a lot of energy. The lyric "Turn around, bright eyes" had first appeared in Steinman's 1969 college musical The Dream Engine, and he had originally written the verse melody for his score to the 1980 film A Small Circle of Friends. Steinman described the finished track as an aria, a wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion, written to be a showpiece for Tyler's voice.
The song became the lead single from her album Faster Than the Speed of Night, released by CBS/Columbia in 1983. It topped the UK Singles Chart, where it was the fifth-best-selling single of the year, and spent four weeks at number one in the United States, holding back Steinman's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" by Air Supply. It sold 60,000 copies a day at its peak.
Russell Mulcahy directed the music video, filmed at the Holloway Sanatorium near Virginia Water in Surrey. It was nominated for two Billboard Video Music Awards in 1983.
Total Eclipse of the Heart runs at 129 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 465 ms. It is in Ab major, Camelot 4B, which shares its notes with F minor and mixes cleanly with Db major and Eb major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.