Lyrics to
American Girl

This version of American Girl was released by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers in 1976.

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Well, she was an American girl
Raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinkin’
That there was a little more to life somewhere else
After all it was a great big world
With lots of places to run to
And if she had to die tryin’
She had one little promise she was gonna keep

O yeah, all right
Take it easy, baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

Well it was kind of cold that night,
She stood alone on her balcony
Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by,
Out on 441 like waves crashin’ on the beach
And for one desperate moment
There he crept back in her memory
God it’s so painful when something that’s so close
Is still so far out of reach

O yeah, all right
Take it easy, baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

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Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers has released many songs over the years besides American Girl. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers released songs from 1976 to 2002 spanning across albums like Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, You're Gonna Get It!, Damn The Torpedoes, Hard Promises, Long After Dark, Southern Accents, Let Me Up (I've Had Enough), Full Moon Fever, Into The Great Wide Open, Wildflowers, She's The One, Echo, and The Last DJ. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers.

If you're a fan of the music of the 1970s looking for more songs from 1976 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and American Girl by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

When you decide to study the lyrics to American Girl, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1976 song by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. Some of the lyrics to American Girl have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

You can understand the lyrics to American Girl if you take apart the structure of the words. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to American Girl" means the words set to the music of American Girl, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to American Girl and the lyrics to American Girl are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers who came here looking just for the lyrics to American Girl, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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