Supertramp: Breakfast in America [A&M]

Why you'll love it

This A&M edition carries the original catalogue number and comes with a lyric inner sleeve. The album spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, went 4x Platinum in the US and gave the band three Hot 100 hits.

This edition

• Lyric inner sleeve
• A&M Records edition (SP-3708)

About the album

Breakfast in America nearly came out as Hello Stranger. Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson first planned an album about their own clashing outlooks on life, two songwriters talking at each other across the record, before deciding to make something fun instead. Hodgson talked Davies into the new title, and the band spent May to December 1978 at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles getting it right.

The two writers still mostly worked apart, which is why the album swings so nicely between them. Hodgson's "The Logical Song" and "Child of Vision" ride a bouncing Wurlitzer, Davies brings the grit on "Gone Hollywood," which he rewrote in a sunnier key at the band's urging, and "Goodbye Stranger" and "Take the Long Way Home" are about as good as late-70s radio rock gets. Peter Henderson co-produced with the band.

At home in Britain, "The Logical Song" and the title track both made the top 10, and the record picked up Grammys for Best Album Package and Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording. The band have always insisted that all the American imagery was a coincidence. Most coincidences don't win a Grammy for the sleeve.

Also at Kops: more Supertramp on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On A&M (cat# SP-3708), the 1979 album.