“In The Air Tonight” is the reason why we love playing the air drums. I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lordĪnd I’ve been waiting for this moment, for all my life, oh lordĬan you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord The drums and the drum solo/fill. In an interview with Mix, Collins explained that he simply “opened mouth and came out.” He then recounted how he didn’t even write the lyrics down at first, but rather penned the lyrics on a piece of scrap paper after hearing his vocals back. The lyrics almost seem as if they were divined-they just spilled out of the singer. The lyrics.ĭistraught and heartbroken, Collins sang his emotions into existence. I’m not quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair, and a lot of frustration,” he said. I just wrote a sequence, and it sounded nice. “One day I was working on a piece in D-minor, the saddest of all. When I got back, she said she was leaving and taking the kids.”Īfter this jarring separation, Collins turned to songwriting. Just hold your breath when I’m over there.’ Then Genesis toured Japan. She said to me, ‘We won’t be together if you do the next tour.’ I said, ‘I’m a musician. “Genesis had done a tour that was far too long. “I wrote it after my wife left me,” Collins told Rolling Stone in 2016. Collins wrote this song after he and his first wife Andrea Bertorelli divorced, and the singer was haunted by the emotions that came rolling in afterward. “In The Air Tonight” sounds haunting because, well, it is slightly haunted. Billboard Hot 100.īut what is it about this song that makes it so striking? The origins. The song eventually charted at the number two position on the U.K. “In The Air Tonight” was also the lead single off of Collins’ debut album, Face Value. Safe to say, Collins had picked up a thing or two while performing with the Genesis rockers. It was his first-ever solo single after serving as the lead vocalist for the rock band Genesis for several years. Released in January 1981, “In The Air Tonight” was written by English drummer and singer/songwriter Phil Collins with co-producer Hugh Padgham. And who doesn’t love that iconic drum fill?
Coming down and landing safely is a challenge, and it’s crucial to a successful flight of any kind.“In The Air Tonight” is eerie, haunting, goosebump-inducing even. Second, there’s a constant danger when in flight, as a fall is always possible. First, it’s tough to come back down after being up in the air or at a high place. The second part speaks to the high we get from escaping the surface, and the difficulty involved with coming back down. Over time we learned about the physics of flight, and have since mastered the art with heavier-than-air machines. We began by trying to imitate birds by giving ourselves wings (looking at you, Daedalus and Icarus), but these attempts were unsuccessful. We can’t do this on our own, of course, because we don’t have wings. The first part deals with humanity’s incessant need to achieve flight throughout our history. ‘I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings’ Various theories exist about the meaning behind the lyrics, but the words speak volumes about the human relationship with verticality. These lyrics are from the song Learning to Fly by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, written by Tom Petty with Jeff Lynne in 1991. Tom Petty, American singer and songwriter, 1950-2017