1985Released
4:05

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Eye of the Tiger. By Songfacts®.

This was the theme song to Rocky III, which was the biggest movie of 1982. Tony Scotti was the president of Survivor's record label, and he played Sylvester Stallone some tracks from the previous Survivor album, Premonition. Stallone thought the sound, writing style and street appeal could fit in his new movie, so he called called Jim Peterik and Frankie Sullivan, who were Survivor's primary songwriters, and left messages on their answering machines. When we spoke with Peterik, he said, "Answering machines were still something of a novelty back then and to see that blinking light was a thrill. When I pressed the playback button I heard, "Hey, yo, Jim, that's a nice message you got there. This is Sylvester Stallone.' It was too thick to be really him, but it was him. That's really the way he talks."

The first two Rocky movies used a very popular orchestral theme written by Bill Conti. That song, "Gonna Fly Now," was a #1 hit in 1977. Says Peterik: "We didn't want to do anything like that. Stallone, in his first conversation to us, he made it real clear he wanted to distance himself from that first song. To him, it was great, but he wanted something to get to the youth market, the cutting edge. Looking back at age 53, it's hilarious to think I was once part of the cutting edge. We attempted to steer clear of the 'Gonna Fly Now' thing."

Jim Peterik told us regarding the origin of this song: "When we got the initial rough cut of the movie, the scene that 'Eye Of The Tiger' appears in was cut to 'Another One Bites The Dust' by Queen. Frankie and I are watching this, the punches are being thrown, and we're going, 'Holy crap, this is working like a charm.' We called Stallone and said, 'Why aren't you using that?' He goes, 'Well, we can't get the publishing rights to it.' Frankie and I looked at each other and went, 'Man, this is going to be tough to beat.' We had the spirit of, 'We've got to try to top this.' I started doing that now-famous dead string guitar riff and started slashing those chords to the punches we saw on the screen, and the whole song took shape in the next three days."

Top Listeners

Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Eye of the Tiger.
CKey
MinorMode
4/4Time Signature
109BPM

Album

The album Eye of the Tiger is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Eye of the Tiger.
Volcano/Legacy
(P) 1993 Chrysalis Records Ltd.; 1982, 1985, 1986, 2006 Volcano Entertainment III, LLC

See your Spotify stats (with number of plays and minutes listened) and discover new music.

Music data, artist images, album covers, and song previews are provided by Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

5.8MArtists
73.5MSongs
12.3MAlbums
6.3KGenres
2.5MLabels
493KPlaylists