Ab minor · Camelot 1A · 99 BPM
What's Love Got to Do With It
by Tina Turner
- 99
- BPM
- Ab minor
- Key
- 1A
- Camelot
- 86
- Danceability
- 22
- Acousticness
Bucks Fizz cut the song first. The British pop group had been offered "What's Love Got to Do with It" some months before Tina Turner recorded it, and member Jay Aston asked to sing lead after hearing the demo, only to be told it was unsuitable for a female vocal. The group went ahead anyway in February 1984, with male member Bobby G taking the vocal, and planned it for their album I Hear Talk. When Turner's version came out first, theirs was shelved and stayed unreleased until a 2000 re-issue of their Are You Ready album.
Writers Terry Britten and Graham Lyle had originally offered the song to Cliff Richard, who rejected it. Turner recorded it for her fifth studio album, Private Dancer, and Capitol Records put it out as a single in May 1984. She had already returned to the charts in late 1983 with a cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together", but this became her biggest-selling single, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and selling more than two million copies worldwide. At 44, she became the oldest solo female artist to top that chart, and it was her first and only US solo number one.
The song won three Grammys in February 1985: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. In 1993 its title was used for the biographical film based on Turner's life.
What's Love Got to Do With It runs at 99 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 606 ms. It is in Ab minor, Camelot 1A, which shares its notes with B major and mixes cleanly with C# minor and Eb minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.