With Arms Wide Open
by Creed
- 138
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 41
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
Scott Stapp started writing "With Arms Wide Open" in early 1998, on tour for the band's first album, when he learned his wife, Hillaree Burns, was pregnant with their first child. He has said the song took 15 minutes at a soundcheck. He overheard guitarist Mark Tremonti playing an improvised melody, ran in, and told him to keep going as he started singing the lyrics.
The first lyrics were written as if for a daughter, and Stapp sang "she" in early live shows, even though the baby was a boy. He changed the word once he knew. Years later he used "they" for all his children. The song, a power ballad, came out on April 18, 2000, as the third single from Human Clay.
It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the issue dated November 11, 2000, for one week, the band's only chart-topper. Stapp and Tremonti won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song, while the vocal performance nomination lost to U2's "Beautiful Day." Stapp named a foundation after the song, to help children and families. Stapp has said heavy airplay made him deliberately change how he sang.
With Arms Wide Open runs at 138 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.74 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 435 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.