Breakdown
by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 113
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 63
- Danceability
- 40
- Acousticness
Mike Campbell played the guitar lick that "Breakdown" is built on, but at first it showed up only near the end of the song. One night Tom Petty was playing the track back in the studio with Dwight Twilley, a bandmate of Phil Seymour. Twilley liked the lick and suggested using it all the way through. Petty agreed.
At 2 AM he gathered the Heartbreakers to record the song again. Their final take ran seven to eight minutes and was cut down to 2 minutes and 39 seconds for the album. Jeff Jourard, an early collaborator, played guitar, and Seymour sang backing vocals.
"Breakdown" was the first single from the band's self-titled debut. It became a top 40 hit in both the United States and Canada. Petty sometimes folded it into Ray Charles's "Hit the Road Jack" when playing it live, and a recording of that mix is on The Live Anthology.
Breakdown runs at 113 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.12 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 531 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.