"Broken Arrow" is a song written by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young and recorded by Buffalo Springfield on their 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. It was recorded in August and September 1967 at Columbia Recording Studios and Sunset Sound Recorders. It incorporates musical ideas from "Down Down Down," a demo Young recorded with Buffalo Springfield (later released on their eponymous box set).
"Broken Arrow" was confessional folk rock. It consists of three parts in three different time signatures interspersed with snippets of sounds, featuring organ, a jazz combo with piano, bass, drums, and a clarinet. The song begins with audience applause (taken not from a Buffalo Springfield show, as some expect, but rather from a concert by the Beatles) and the opening of "Mr. Soul" (which opens the album) recorded in the studio. The second verse begins with the sound of an audience cheering, while an organ plays a version of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", before it fades into piano and drums and opens into the verse. The third verse begins the sound of a military snare drum that plays drum rolls, first quietly, and getting louder in each succession, until the fifth time, the drums loop and overlap and cut off to begin the third verse. The Jazz combo plays an improvisation, first taken up by the clarinet, and followed by the piano, until it fades out, and a heart beating sound is played until it gradually fades out.
Each of the three verses uses surreal imagery to deal with emotions (emptiness of fame, teenage angst, hopelessness), and contains self-references to Buffalo Springfield and Young. They all end with the same lines:
An acoustic solo version of the song appears on the Neil Young live album Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 which was released on Reprise Records in 2008.
The Creek Indians held a ceremony after the Civil War that included a breaking of an arrow to symbolize the war's end.