As with Even in the Quietest Moments..., Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson wrote most of their songs separately but conceived the theme for the album jointly.

"[9] This idea was eventually scrapped in favour of an album of "fun" songs, and though Davies initially wanted to keep the title Hello Stranger, he was convinced by Hodgson to change it to Breakfast in America.

"[9] Due to the title and the explicit satirising of American culture in the cover and three of the songs ("Gone Hollywood", "Breakfast in America" and "Child of Vision"), many listeners interpreted the album as a whole as being a satire of the United States.

Written by Rick Davies, the song tells about a person who moves to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a movie star, but finds it far more difficult than he imagined.

Roger Hodgson has said that the song was written to be an equivalent to "Gone Hollywood", looking at how Americans live, though he confessed that he had only a limited familiarity with US culture at the time of writing.

It was in recording these demos that the band worked out the backing track arrangements for all the songs (with the exception of "Take the Long Way Home") and determined the order in which they would appear on the album.

[10] In order to avoid spending a lot of time on mixing, the band and their production team devoted a week to experimenting with different sound setups until they found the perfect arrangement.

The effort proved to be wasted, as the engineering team would end up spending more than two extremely stressful months searching for the right mix, and were finished after that length of time only because the deadline had arrived, not because they felt at all satisfied with the results.

[12] Melody Maker journalist Harry Doherty offered a third take on the duo's interactions during the album sessions: "In three days with the band, I don't think I saw Davies and Hodgson converse once, other than to exchange courteous greetings.

The twin World Trade Center towers appear as two stacks of boxes, and the plate of breakfast represents The Battery, the departure point for the Staten Island Ferry.

The back cover photo, depicting the band members having breakfast while reading their respective hometown newspapers, was taken at a diner called Bert's Mad House.

Breakfast in America won the 1980 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package, defeating albums by Talking Heads and Led Zeppelin, among others.

[7] Breakfast in America topped the US Billboard 200 for six weeks and became Supertramp's biggest selling album, while producing four hit singles: "The Logical Song", "Goodbye Stranger", "Take the Long Way Home" and the title track.

[16] In a positive review for Rolling Stone magazine, music critic Stephen Holden viewed Breakfast in America as an improvement over the "swatches of meandering, Genesis-like esoterica" on Supertramp's previous albums, and called it "a textbook-perfect album of post-Beatles, keyboard-centered English art rock that strikes the shrewdest possible balance between quasi-symphonic classicism and rock & roll ... the songs here are extraordinarily melodic and concisely structured, reflecting these musicians' saturation in American pop since their move to Los Angeles in 1977.

[14] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the album's "tightly written, catchy, well-constructed pop songs" and described it as the band's "high-water mark".

[2] Rob Sheffield, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), also felt that its "nice moments" were the highlights, including "the jolly 'Take the Long Way Home,' the adjectively crazed 'Logical Song,' [and] 'Goodbye Stranger.

[4] In the 1987 edition of The World Critics List, music historian Joel Whitburn ranked Breakfast in America the fourth-greatest album of all time.

[27] Recognising the band's disfavour among music critics during their career,[28] Q magazine ranked Breakfast in America second on its "Records it's OK to Love" list in 2006.

The reissue was supervised by Bill Levenson with art direction by Vartan and design by Mike Diehl, with production coordination by Beth Stempel.