Breaking Us in Two

Breaking Us in Two opens the second side of Night and Day, a slow piano song about a couple who can no longer reach each other. Jackson has said little in public about where it came from; critics at the time heard the lyric as suitably anguished, and Ultimate Classic Rock later called it an impossibly sad ballad. The British single carried El Blanco, a Spanish-language version of Target, on the B-side.

It was released in Britain in August 1982 and again in February 1983, but its success came in America, where it climbed to eighteen on the Hot 100 in March 1983 and to eight on the adult contemporary chart. The British reissue peaked at fifty-nine. Steve Barron's video was filmed at Oakworth station on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in Yorkshire, and was in medium rotation on MTV in February 1983. The British weeklies were cool: Charles Shaar Murray in NME found it pleasant rather than stirring.

Afterlife

Mandy Moore covered it on her 2003 album Coverage, and setlist.fm also logs versions by Richard Buckner and Jay Gonzalez. Jackson played it more than two hundred times between the Dominion Theatre in London in June 1982 and a show in Denver in 2019. His demo is on the 2003 deluxe edition of Night and Day.