Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Neil Sedaka, who died on Feb. 27 at age 86, by diving back into the first of his three No. 1 hits: the irresistible “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”
When artists gain renown as singer-songwriters — particularly paradigmatic ones like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen — they’re often most celebrated for their lyrics, and treated as if they were poets who also happen to be musicians. Neil Sedaka became one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the early rock era primarily through his strengths as a melodicist and a vocalist, with the words part of it usually coming through collaboration with trusted partners. Tellingly, most likely the most famous lyric that Sedaka ever penned was scarcely a lyric at all: “Down, dooby-doo-down-down, comma-comma-down….”
By the time of “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” Neil Sedaka was already a well-established hitmaker, both for himself and others. Most of those hits came in conjunction with lyricist Howard Greenfield, who Sedaka had met when the two were teenage music students in New York. The duo started out writing showtune-type songs, but as Fred Bronson writes in The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, pivoted to rock-based pop music after Sedaka and his high school girlfriend Carole Klein (later known as Carole King) heard The Penguins’ “Earth Angel” on a pizza parlor jukebox. Sedaka and Greenfield found some R&B success, and had their first major pop hit when Connie Francis brought their “Stupid Cupid” to the top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958.
After a brief period singing with vocal group the Tokens — later to score a Hot 100 No. 1 hit of their own with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” — Sedaka embarked upon a solo career in the late ’50s, scoring a top 15 breakthrough with “The Diary” in 1959. A brief rough patch followed, but Sedaka rebounded in 1960 with “Oh Carol!” — inspired by his teenage paramour, by then a renowned songwriter in her own right in collaboration with Gerry Goffin — and the hits poured out from there, with “Stairway to Heaven,” “Calendar Girl” and “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” all of which followed “Carol” to the top 10.
But Sedaka wouldn’t top the Hot 100 for the first time until 1962, with the release of “Breaking Up.” The song leads off with that semi-nonsensical vocal hook, which Sedaka thought of as a last-minute addition to the song. He intended to swap in more fleshed-out lyrics but never did; the melodic phrasing of it is so infectious and momentum-building that more logical wording might’ve just slowed it down anyway. Starting immediately with the vocal hook — accompanied only by handclaps, to give the intro a little extra kinetic energy — made “Breaking Up” one of the most immediately striking and memorable pop-rock songs of the early ’60s, a winner by the first mention of its title, which punctuates the end of the intro and introduces the general concept of the song.
An all-time fantastic title, too: Sedaka thought of it before anything else, pitching Greenfield multiple times on the idea of devising an entire song around the phrase. It’s a lyrical truism with the kind of wisdom that feels particularly sagacious only within the context of pop music: Of course breaking up is hard to do, but when expressed by Sedaka at the end of each verse (and the beginning of each bridge) of his pained plea to his partner to “give our love another try,” it feels like hard-earned insight. It also helps that the phrase is long and sturdy enough to be a real lyrical load-bearer — there is no separate chorus to “Breaking Up,” just the verse-ending title mention functioning as the song’s main refrain, but it’s substantive enough on its own to give the song its skeletal structure.
The song is so dominated by its intro — which also continues as a backing vocal throughout the verse — and its title, that its other lyrics are minimal, and relatively unremarkable. The other most memorable parts aren’t the words itself, but the way they’re deployed — like the way Sedaka stretches the last word of “Now I know that it’s true” into three syllables, or how at the end of a relatively patient, stretched-out bridge, Sedaka suddenly gets manic, rushing out an entire “Instead of breaking up/ I wish that we were making up again” sentiment that ends up delaying the return of the main verse by a whole measure. And of course, his double-tracked vocal makes every word of the verse heart-piercing, just by sheer virtue of its masterful two-part harmony.
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It all added up to one of the most undeniable pop-rock confections of its era — and one that, at a lean 2:18, didn’t waste a second of its runtime. It quickly took over the summer of 1962 upon its late-June release, taking just seven weeks to rush the top of the Hot 100 dated Aug. 11. It knocked out “Roses Are Red (My Love)” by Bobby Vinton — arguably the pre-eminent crooner of the early ’60s, but one with a much more old-fashioned energy than Sedaka’s youthful Brill Building pop-rock — and lasted a pair of weeks on top, before being deposed by Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (co-penned, incidentally, by Sedaka’s former sweetheart King). Future collaborator Elton John referred to “Breaking Up” as “one of the great songs of all time” in his foreword to the Sedaka biography Rock ‘n’ Roll Survivor, and commented that it “will always be sung.” (Indeed, the song revisited the Hot 100 times multiple times as recorded by other artists, including by vocal group The Happenings in 1968, balladeer Lenny Welch in 1970, and prefab pop outfit The Partridge Family in 1972.)
Sedaka squeezed out another top five hit by year’s end with follow-up “Next Door to an Angel” — which repeated the “Breaking Up” formula to a rather conspicuous degree, right down to the double-tracked vocal verse harmony and “Doo-ba-bop-bop, oh-do-bop, she-down-down” intro. But the hits slowed a little in 1963, as The 4 Seasons, The Beach Boys and Phil Spector-produced girl-group pop took over at top 40’s vanguard. Then, in 1964, The Beatles and the British Invasion hit, and as with many early-’60s hitmakers, Sedaka’s career was never the same: He still scored three top 40 hits in ’63, but as of ’64, he wouldn’t even hit the chart’s top 75 again that decade.
If that had been the end of Neil Sedaka’s chart run, there would have been no shame in it. He still finished the ’60s with 10 top 20 hits, including six top 10s and a No. 1 in “Breaking Up,” plus additional hits co-penned for Connie Francis, Jimmy Clanton and even The 5th Dimension at decade’s end. As it turned out, it was just the first act: Sedaka was due for a major career revival in the mid ’70s, including another pair of No. 1s — which we’ll get to in this column later in the week — and a top 10 recording of his signature ’60s hit, recasting “Breaking Up” as a piano ballad, and adding a new Tony Bennett-like intro vamp (“You tell me that you’re leaving/ I can’t believe it’s true…”). But even before that new addition, Sedaka couldn’t resist starting the recording with a familiar sound from the early ’60s, providing crucial context before quickly fading out: “Do-do-do-down, dooby-doo-down-down, comma-comma…”
Tomorrow, Forever No. 1 looks at Sedaka’s second No. 1 — and first in 13 years — the ballad “Laughter in the Rain.”
