Broken
by Seether
- 123
- BPM
- Eb minor
- Key
- 2A
- Camelot
- 41
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Shaun Morgan wrote "Broken" about the end of his marriage and family. His wife had chosen to stay in South Africa with their daughter rather than move with him to the United States. Seether first put the song on their debut album, Disclaimer, in 2002.
They reworked and recorded it again in 2004 with Amy Lee, the lead singer of Evanescence and then Morgan's girlfriend. That version went onto the soundtrack of the Marvel film The Punisher and onto Disclaimer II, and it came out as a single on April 19, 2004. It reached number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, number three in Australia and number two in New Zealand, and it later went four-times platinum in the US and Australia. It is the band's only song to reach the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.
Nigel Dick directed the video. Morgan sits in an abandoned car with an acoustic guitar while Lee appears behind him in black angel wings. The two wander through a ruined trailer park that the Disclaimer II DVD revealed had been burned to ashes by a crystal meth lab explosion. Lee knows where Morgan is. He never sees her. That fits the lyric "you don't feel me here anymore". In 2004 Seether won a Metal Edge Readers' Choice Award for Best Song from a Movie Soundtrack.
Broken runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in Eb minor, Camelot 2A, which shares its notes with F# major and mixes cleanly with Ab minor and Bb minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.