Badfinger may be a band from a different generation, but their song “Baby Blue” certainly turned some heads during Sunday night’s series finale of “Breaking Bad”.
The band has only one surviving member after dealing with drugs, depression, and suicide, and he sat down with Entertainment Weekly to talk about the song and its immediate success on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon.
“It’d be lovely to start selling a lot of records again,” Joey Molland said with a laugh. “But you’ve got to take these things as they come, you know? It could be just a big flash in the pan. But it’s certainly exciting, and I’m thrilled to be dealing with it. People getting interested in the band and the music is just great. Who knows, maybe people will start looking at Badfinger records again.”
“Baby Blue” provided the soundtrack for the final scene of the show’s finale, a heartbreaking but–most fans agree–ultimately expected ending for a deeply troubled character. “Guess I got what I deserved”, the first line of the song says. Right now, it’s soaring up the charts on iTunes and Spotify, with a 9,000% stream increase on the latter. Funnily enough, because the song is a cover, Molland didn’t even know it would be included in the episode.
“It’s a Peter Ham song, so Pete’s estate and the record label, publishing house — they’d communicate with them about it.,” Molland explained. “I was actually just catching the end of the show, really. I was working around the house all day, packing up stuff for the Goodwill, and just doing mundane stuff like that. I caught the last, like, ten minutes of it, where the guy gets shot and all that. My youngest son watches it. I’m not really a big TV guy, to tell you the truth. I had an idea of what it was about, and I knew that last night was the last show in it — it’s all anybody’s really been talking about the last few days or week or so. So, yeah, it was all good. I was really surprised! The song sounds great — I’ve always liked the record myself. It’s one of my favorites, for sure. It was a big hit for us, too. So it was great to hear it.”
Image: YouTube/AMC