![]() To me, it's just a really beautiful love song." "Some people take it literally and out of context. "We used to have people come up to us and tell us they thought it was about suicide because of the one line about, ' If she had to die.' But what they didn't get was, the whole line is, ' if she had to die trying,'" Campbell later said. 441. The college has refuted this claim, and, the band said it's simply not true. A girl was purported to have jumped from the windows of one of the residential buildings that happened to be near U.S. Listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 'American Girl'īack home in Florida, a rumor began to circulate that the song was based on an alleged suicide that had taken place on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. "I think everyone knew that there was a little lightning in the bottle on that one," Lynch later told Petty biographer Warren Zanes. "American Girl" was recorded on the Fourth of July 1976, the exact date of America's bicentennial, and something about it just felt right, the members thought - as if all the pieces of who they were trying to become were finally starting to piece together. "We called it the laser vocal," Campbell later told Songfacts. The high-reaching backing vocals were supplied by Phil Seymour of the Dwight Twilley Band, who also sang backing on the album's first single, "Breakdown." This was before Pro Tools, so the band had to get creative if it wanted to track a long, extended vocal like the one heard at the end of "American Girl," a feat achieved by Petty and Seymour singing the note and staggering their breathing. "They're damn present." And what sounds like a 12-string guitar was two six-strings played by Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell, layered on top of each other. Campbell's trick to making the song sound more in tune? Leaving the third out of several chords, creating a sound that mirrored that of a horn section. "The drums are all on one track, which is really unusual," Petty recalled. Drummer Stan Lynch provided a Bo Diddley-inspired backbeat. When the song was brought to the studio, it was time to up the ante. ![]() "And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. "The cars would go by," he said in Paul Zollo's 2005 book, Conversations With Tom Petty. ![]() 441, where a steady stream of traffic ran. Petty wrote "American Girl" on his acoustic guitar, not by choice but because it was the only guitar he owned. He was living in Florida at the time, and his apartment backed up against U.S. "American Girl," the final track on their self-titled debut album summed up a sentiment many ambitious people learn in the land of opportunity: The American dream can be glitzy and glamorous, but it's not always what it's cracked up to be. At the time of the song's writing, Petty and the Heartbreakers had only recently signed a recording contract. It was a major milestone for the band, which had traveled from Gainesville, Fla., to Los Angeles in search of a "little more to life," but the deal didn't make the group an overnight star.
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