Breakfast in America
by Supertramp
- 75
- BPM
- C minor
- Key
- 5A
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 43
- Acousticness
Roger Hodgson says he wrote "Breakfast in America" when he was 19. He remembers dreaming and having fun one day when the song just flowed out, and thinks the lyric took about an hour. His original two-track demo from around 1969 went up on his website as an mp3 in the early 2000s. Rick Davies is credited with the retort line "What's she got? Not a lot."
The credit has been muddled over the years. The inner sleeve of the 1979 album lists Davies alone as composer and lyricist, while the center label of the vinyl disc and the vinyl single credit both Hodgson and Davies. When Supertramp started playing the song on a reunion tour without Hodgson, he told reporters he wrote it, that Davies had initially hated it, and that he believed Davies did not play on the recording at all.
The lyrics are about a person, presumably British, who dreams of visiting the United States. The title track of the 1979 album was a top-ten hit in the UK, and a live version reached no. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1981. Hodgson played it on his 2010 world tour, released as the live album Classics Live. Gym Class Heroes sampled its music and chorus in "Cupid's Chokehold."
Breakfast in America runs at 75 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in largo territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.2 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 800 ms. It is in C minor, Camelot 5A, which shares its notes with Eb major and mixes cleanly with F minor and G minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.