American Girl
by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 114
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 56
- Danceability
- 45
- Acousticness
Tom Petty wrote "American Girl" in an apartment in Encino, California, next to a freeway and close to Leon Russell's house. The cars going by sounded to him like the ocean. "That was my ocean. My Malibu," he later said, and he thought that must have inspired the lyric.
A different story grew up in Florida. The line about cars rolling by on 441 led people to claim the song was about a student who jumped from the Beaty Towers dormitory at the University of Florida. A university spokesman said no one had died that way, and the building has narrow windows that do not open and no balconies. Petty called it an urban myth. The opening phrase "raised on promises" echoes a line in the 1963 film Dementia 13.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers recorded the song on July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial, for their debut album. Shelter Records put it out as a single in February 1977. It missed the US chart but reached number 40 in the UK. The band played it last at the Hollywood Bowl on September 25, 2017, closing the encore of the final show of their 40th Anniversary Tour. Petty died on October 2.
American Girl runs at 114 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.11 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 526 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.