Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do — Neil Sedaka (1962)

Neil Sedaka was already a successful presence on the American pop chart when he and his longtime writing partner Howard Greenfield composed "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" in 1962. Sedaka had grown up in Brooklyn and studied piano at the Juilliard School before gravitating toward songwriting and performing as a teenager. His partnership with Greenfield, which had begun in adolescence, was among the most productive in the Brill Building ecosystem that dominated American pop songwriting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The pair had placed songs with numerous artists and scored Sedaka's own performing debut with "The Diary" in 1959 on RCA Victor.

By 1962, Sedaka had established himself at RCA Victor Records, one of the major labels of the era, where he worked with producer Al Nevins and later with other in-house producers. The Brill Building songwriting machine of which Sedaka and Greenfield were a part operated on a model of professional craftsmanship, producing songs on demand for both Sedaka's own recordings and for other artists. "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" emerged from this environment as a piece designed with explicit commercial intent, built around a musical hook and a lyrical concept that could be immediately grasped and retained by a mass radio audience.

The recording was made in the spring of 1962 and featured an arrangement built around the rhythmic syncopations that characterized the pop productions of the era. The most distinctive element was the opening percussion pattern and the background vocal chanting, which gave the track an energy that matched the lyric's paradoxical mix of sadness and pop buoyancy. Sedaka's vocal was bright and accessible, pitched for radio and teenage consumption, and the production struck the balance between professional polish and emotional directness that the Brill Building school prized above all else.

"Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" was released by RCA Victor in June 1962, entering the Billboard Hot 100 on June 30, 1962, at position 66. The chart ascent was swift and sustained, moving through the top 30 and top 20 in rapid succession. The record reached its peak on August 11, 1962, when it attained number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first number-one single of Sedaka's performing career. The record spent 14 weeks total on the Billboard Hot 100, a strong commercial performance in the competitive summer 1962 market.

The timing of the record's peak placed it at the summit of the American chart during a summer when the pop landscape was being shaped by the competing forces of the Brill Building, the remnants of the first wave of rock and roll, and the early stirrings of the sounds that would soon be overtaken by the British Invasion. In this context, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" represented the Brill Building sound at its most commercially effective, a polished, melodically sophisticated single that demonstrated the professional songwriting tradition's capacity to produce hits through craft and calculation as much as through inspiration.

The record sold in quantities that made it one of the most successful singles of its season. It became one of the defining recordings of the Sedaka-Greenfield partnership and one of the most frequently cited examples of the Brill Building aesthetic at its most commercially successful. The song was certified as a million-seller, reflecting the depth of its penetration into the American teenage market and its sustained airplay across radio formats.

The cultural afterlife of "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" was considerably extended by Sedaka's own decision to re-record the song in 1975 as a slow ballad, entirely reimagining the arrangement and emotional register. That 1975 recording on Rocket Records, produced during Sedaka's commercial comeback, reached number 8 on the Hot 100 and became one of the notable instances in pop music history of an artist substantially revising their own work and achieving commercial success with the new interpretation. The existence of two successful versions of the same song by the same artist underscored the durability of the underlying composition.

The original 1962 recording has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and it remains a central document of early 1960s American pop. Its success helped cement Sedaka's reputation as one of the most reliable hitmakers of his era, a reputation that would sustain his career through the British Invasion's displacement of many of his contemporaries and his subsequent return to prominence in the mid-1970s. Greenfield and Sedaka's compositional partnership, exemplified by this song, represents one of the most successful professional songwriting collaborations of the rock and roll era.