Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue’ Gets New Life After 'Breaking Bad' Finale Appearance

"Baby Blue," a 1972 hit by British power-pop band Badfinger, played in the background as Breaking Bad’s leading antihero – the cancer-ridden history teacher and family man-turned-drug lord Walter White (Bryan Cranston) – dies from a gunshot on the floor of a meth lab in the series finale.

Walt, as the AMC series progressed, suffered from increasingly excessive hubris and the mounting desire to outdo not only his competition, but also himself. His signature product – his almost impossibly pure meth – happened to be clear crystals in a shade of baby blue.

“Guess I got what I deserved,” begin the lyrics to "Baby Blue." “Kept you waiting there too long my love/ All that time without a word/ Didn't know you'd think that I'd forget/ Or I'd regret the special love I have for you — My Baby Blue.”

Badfinger peaked musically in the 70s, and suffered the tragically premature loss of group members Pete Hamm and Tom Evans. The lone surviving musician Joey Molland, however, was fortunate enough to hear his band's hit song playing in the final scene of one of the most highly anticipated series finales in recent years.

Since Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” closed out Breaking Bad, it has skyrocketed in the charts and has seen a 9000% increase in streaming on Spotify. “It was a big hit for us, too. So it was great to hear it,” Molland told Entertainment Weekly. “And I’m glad they used our version of it and not a recut of it. It’s great, you know? Today it’s in the charts, and yesterday it was kind of like an oldies record!”

“Baby Blue” was chosen specificly by series creator Vince Gilligan, who also penned the script and directed the episode. Despite initial pushback, Gilligan, an admitted Badfinger fan, eventually won over the rest of his crew. “In came the dailies, with that wonderful crane shot moving over Walter White, and once we played the song, [we thought], 'Oh, I get it now,'" Breaking Bad’s music supervisor Thomas Golubić told Rolling Stone. "This is a love-affair story of Walt and his love of science, and this was his greatest product – his greatest triumph as a chemist. It wasn't about Walter White as a criminal or a murderer or an awful person. It was him ending on his own terms. It felt creatively right."

Breaking Bad's finale, titled "Finale," was watched by an estimated 10 million people, nearly four million more than it's second most watched – it's penultimate "Granite State."

– Chelsea Regan

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