Wish You Were Here
by Incubus
- 169
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 25
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
Incubus was finishing Morning View in 2001. "Wish You Were Here" was one of the last songs written for it. Mike Einziger said it is about being happy living for the moment. Brandon Boyd said it was not about a person but about a brief moment with the band making the record, when he wished someone were there to share it.
The song played at Moby's Area:One festival that summer, and the band announced it as the lead single in June. Released on August 14, 2001, it reached No. 2 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and No. 4 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
Phil Harder shot the first video that August. After the September 11 attacks, in which victims leapt from the Twin Towers, the band's people and MTV rejected the video. In it, the band ran from crowds and then leaped off a bridge into the water, a scene copied from the Monkees movie Head. A replacement mixed Harder's white-backdrop footage with home-video-style footage Brett Spivey shot at the band's Morning View house, and it reached No. 8 on Total Request Live by December. The original appeared on The Morning View Sessions DVD in May 2002. Incubus played the song on the Late Show with David Letterman on November 1, 2001.
Wish You Were Here runs at 169 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 355 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.