White Room
by Cream
- 112
- BPM
- D minor
- Key
- 7A
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 23
- Acousticness
Poet Pete Brown began the words for "White Room" with a hippie girl and a title, "Cinderella's Last Goodnight", but it went nowhere. He turned instead to an eight-page poem about a new apartment he had moved into, with white walls and bare furnishings, where he gave up drinking and drugs. The demons he fought there shaped its imagery. The poem was cut down to a few verses. Jack Bruce wrote the music for Cream.
The band started recording the song in London in July 1967. Work moved to Atlantic Studios in New York in October and December, and finished in three sessions in February, April and June 1968. Bruce sang and played bass, Eric Clapton overdubbed guitar through a wah-wah pedal for a talking effect, and Ginger Baker played drums and timpani. Felix Pappalardi, the producer, added violas. The chord progression is identical to that of Cream's earlier "Tales of Brave Ulysses". Bruce and Baker each claimed to have given the song its five-beat opening, which had been written in common time. Bruce later said the opening made the record company wary of its commercial chances.
"White Room" was on the studio half of the 1968 double album Wheels of Fire. A shorter US single edit without the third verse went to AM radio in September, and the UK single in January 1969 used the full version.
White Room runs at 112 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.14 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 536 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.