| Breakfast in America | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album by Supertramp | ||||
| Released | 29 March 1979 | |||
| Recorded | May – December 1978 at The Village Recorder/Studio B, Los Angeles, California | |||
| Genre | Progressive rock, pop | |||
| Length | 46:12 | |||
| Label | A&M | |||
| Producer | Peter Henderson, Supertramp | |||
| Supertramp chronology | ||||
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Breakfast in America is the sixth album by the band Supertramp, released in 1979. It was recorded the previous year at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles. It featured three U.S. Billboard hit singles: "The Logical Song" (#6), "Goodbye Stranger" (#15), and "Take the Long Way Home" (#10). In the UK, "The Logical Song" and the title track were both top 10 hits, the only two the group had in their native country.[1] Breakfast in America won two Grammy Awards in 1980.
Contents |
The album went through two rounds of demos. The first were home demos, each of which consisted of the chief songwriter (either Rick Davies or Roger Hodgson) playing either acoustic piano or Wurlitzer electric piano and singing.[2] The second were eight-track demos recorded at Southcombe Studios in Burbank, California during late April and early May of 1978; it was in recording these demos that the band worked out the backing track arrangements for all the songs (with the exception of "Take the Long Way Home") and determined the order in which they would appear on the album.[2]
In order to avoid spending a lot of time on mixing, the band and their production team devoted a week to experimenting with different sound setups until they found the perfect arrangement. The effort proved to be wasted, as the engineering team would end up spending more than two extremely stressful months searching for the right mix, and were only finished after that length of time because the deadline had arrived, not because they felt at all satisfied with the results.[2]
Tensions between Hodgson and Davies were reportedly almost non-existent on this album. Engineer Peter Henderson recalled "They got along fantastically well and everyone was really happy. There was a very, very good vibe and I think everyone was really buoyed up by the recordings and A&M's response to them."[2] Hodgson contested this, saying that he and Davies had increasingly different lifestyles, and that he felt that Davies disliked many of his songs and only kept quiet about his displeasure because he sensed that he would be voted down.[3]
Davies didn't want the album to be titled Breakfast In America, preferring either Working Title or Hello Stranger as the title.
Breakfast In America features a number of songs played on the Wurlitzer electric piano, displaying its most distinctive abilities. In particular, the different sounds made by the Wurlitzer depending on how hard it is played – songs such as "Child of Vision" or "The Logical Song" are built upon this sound. The peculiar sound of the Wurlitzer had already been put forth in older songs such as "Dreamer" or "Lady" but never so extensively into an entire album. Six of the ten tracks have the Wurlitzer on them.
Breakfast In America became Supertramp's biggest-selling album with more than 6 million copies sold in the US alone and was #1 on Billboard's Pop Albums Chart for six weeks in the spring and summer of 1979. The album also hit #1 in Norway, Austria, Canada and Australia. It was also their biggest album in the UK, reaching #3 (for five consecutive weeks) and remaining on the charts for exactly a year.[4]
"Gone Hollywood" is the opening track of Breakfast in America. Written by Rick Davies, the song tells about a person who wishes he did not ever set foot in Los Angeles. The lyrics were originally even more bleak, but under pressure from the other band members, Davies rewrote them to be more optimistic and commercial.[2]
"Child of Vision" is the closing track. Much like "The Logical Song", it uses a Wurlitzer electric piano as the main instrument. After the lyrical part, the song goes into a long grand piano solo alongside the original Wurlitzer electric piano melody. The track fades out with a short saxophone solo by John Helliwell. Roger Hodgson has said that the song was written to be an equivalent to "Gone Hollywood", looking at how Americans live, though he confessed that he had only a limited familiarity with USA culture at the time of writing.[3] He also said there is a slight possibility that he subconsciously had Rick Davies in mind while writing the lyrics.[3]
The album's front cover resembles an overlook of New York City through an airplane window. It was designed by Mike Doud and depicted Kate Murtagh, dressed as a waitress named "Libby" from a diner, as a Statue of Liberty figure holding up a glass of orange juice on a small plate in one hand (in place of the torch on the Statue), and a foldable restaurant menu in the other hand, on which "Breakfast In America" is written. The background featured a city made from a cornflake box, ashtray, cutlery (for the wharfs), eggboxes, vinegar, ketchup and mustard bottles, all spraypainted white. The twin World Trade Center towers appear as two stacks of boxes and the plate of breakfast represents Battery Park, the departure point for the Staten Island Ferry. The back cover photo, depicting the band members having breakfast while reading their respective hometown newspapers, was taken at a diner called Bert's Mad House.
Breakfast In America won the 1980 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package, beating out albums by Talking Heads and Led Zeppelin, among others.
| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | [5] |
Breakfast in America was seen as a departure for the band, with its pop sound deviating from the progressive rock stylings that defined their earlier work. Rolling Stone were receptive to the band's new direction, writing, "Breakfast in America is a textbook-perfect album of post-Beatles, keyboard-centered English art rock that strikes the shrewdest possible balance between quasi-symphonic classicism and rock & roll. Whereas Supertramp's earlier LPs were bogged down by swatches of meandering, Genesis-like esoterica, the songs here are extraordinarily melodic and concisely structured, reflecting these musicians' saturation in American pop since their move to Los Angeles in 1977."[6] Breakfast in America would become Supertramp's most popular album. According to Allmusic, who awarded the album 4.5/5 stars, it had, by the 1990s, sold in excess of 18 million copies worldwide.[7] It has sold well over 20 million copies to date.[8][9]
In the 1987 edition of the The World Critics List, music critic Joel Whitburn ranked Breakfast in America the fourth greatest album of all time.[10] In the 1994 edition of The Guinness All Time Top 1000 Albums, Breakfast in America was voted #207 in the all-time greatest rock and pop albums,[11] and it was voted the 69th greatest British rock album of all time in a 2006 Classic Rock industry poll.[12] Triple M listeners voted the album #43 in the "100 Greatest Albums of All Time".[13] Recognising the band's disfavour among music critics during their career,[14] Q magazine ranked Breakfast in America second on its "Records it's OK to Love" list in 2006.[15]
The album was first re-released as a remaster on Gold CD from MFSL.
On 11 June 2002 A&M Records reissued Breakfast in America with full original album art plus the label art from side one recreated on the CD. It was mastered from the original master tapes by Greg Calbi and Jay Messina at Sterling Sound, New York, 2002. The reissue was supervised by Bill Levenson with art direction by Vartan and design by Mike Diehl, with production coordination by Beth Stempel. It makes limited use of dynamic range compression and peak limiting, rejecting the loudness war trends of modern CD releases.
A deluxe edition was released on October 4, 2010 including a second disc with songs recorded live in 1979, in particular songs not appearing on the live album Paris.
A super deluxe edition, which was released on 6 December 2010, includes the 2 disc Deluxe Edition CD, Vinyl LP, Poster, DVD, hardcover book, and other memorabilia.
All songs written and composed by Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson.
| Side one | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Title | Lead vocals | Length | ||||||
| 1. | "Gone Hollywood" | Hodgson and Davies | 5:20 | ||||||
| 2. | "The Logical Song" | Hodgson | 4:10 | ||||||
| 3. | "Goodbye Stranger" | Davies and Hodgson | 5:50 | ||||||
| 4. | "Breakfast in America" | Hodgson | 2:38 | ||||||
| 5. | "Oh Darling" | Davies and Hodgson | 3:58 | ||||||
| Side two | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Title | Lead vocals | Length | ||||||
| 6. | "Take the Long Way Home" | Hodgson | 5:08 | ||||||
| 7. | "Lord Is It Mine" | Hodgson | 4:09 | ||||||
| 8. | "Just Another Nervous Wreck" | Davies | 4:26 | ||||||
| 9. | "Casual Conversations" | Davies | 2:58 | ||||||
| 10. | "Child of Vision" | Hodgson, Davies and Helliwell | 7:25 | ||||||
Additional personnel
Album
Year-end charts
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Certifications & Sales
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| Year | Winner | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Breakfast in America | Best Recording Package |
| 1980 | Breakfast in America | Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical |
| Year | Nominated | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Breakfast in America | Album of the Year |
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