Vasoline
by Stone Temple Pilots
- 84
- BPM
- Bb major
- Key
- 6B
- Camelot
- 30
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
The key line in "Vasoline" was a mishearing. Scott Weiland told Songfacts in 2014 that his parents once put on the Eagles' "Life in the Fast Lane", and he thought the singers were saying "Flies in the Vaseline". He wrote the lyrics for Stone Temple Pilots, who put the song on their second album, Purple. Robert DeLeo made the odd intro by running his bass through a wah-wah pedal.
Weiland gave two readings of the song. On VH1 Storytellers he said it was about feeling like an insect under a magnifying glass. In his autobiography, Not Dead and Not for Sale, he wrote that it is about being stuck in the same situation over and over, about becoming a junkie, and about lying to his first wife, Jannina Castaneda, and the band about his heroin addiction.
Atlantic Records sent it to US radio on May 25, 1994, and it spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart. Kevin Kerslake directed the video. It exists in three versions that reuse the same footage. The X version opens on flypaper and a laughing clown, played by Robert DeLeo. The Y version opens on a girl chasing butterflies, and the Z version on a man at a sharpening stone wheel.
Vasoline runs at 84 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 2.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 714 ms. It is in Bb major, Camelot 6B, which shares its notes with G minor and mixes cleanly with Eb major and F major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.