Wheel in the Sky
by Journey
- 105
- BPM
- D minor
- Key
- 7A
- Camelot
- 49
- Danceability
- 8
- Acousticness
Journey had decided to move to an edgier sound, and they started recording simple hard rock pieces with a new lead vocalist, Robert Fleischman. Steve Perry replaced him once work on Infinity began in earnest. "Wheel in the Sky" came out of that period. It was written by Fleischman, Neal Schon and Diane Valory, the wife of bassist Ross Valory. It started as her poem "Wheels in My Mind."
Journey released it on January 19, 1978, in the United States and April 8 in the UK, on the album Infinity. It reached #57 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first Journey song to chart there, and #45 on the Canadian RPM 100.
The song opens with a 28-second instrumental before Perry sings the first verse. A guitar solo from Schon comes after the second verse and chorus. The chorus then repeats four times before the outro. The narrator describes the arrival of winter. He has not been home in a year or more and hopes the woman he misses holds on a little longer. The wheel that keeps turning has been read as a metaphor for life on the road, or as the sun.
Wheel in the Sky runs at 105 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.29 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 571 ms. It is in D minor, Camelot 7A, which shares its notes with F major and mixes cleanly with G minor and A minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.