If anything, Petty’s untimely death has only made people love him more. His look says, “You’re gonna get it!” (This implication was literalized as the title of Petty’s second album.) But Tom Petty was also a great rock ‘n’ roll singer. (It was played only six times by The Heartbreakers in 22 years.). You’re either prowling for an unhealthy road-trip snack or nervously seeking out a cure for a sore throat or constipation. One of my favorites that comes from a less heralded source is the opening line of this track from the first Mudcrutch album: “My love’s an ocean, you better not cross it.” While this was the introductory single from Petty’s sideline Southern-rock ensemble, “Scare Easy” sounds like prime Damn The Torpedoes-era Heartbreakers â all surly menace hiding a supposed tough guy’s tender heart. When the Heartbreakers reassembled in 1991 for Into the Great Wide Open, perhaps there was even an element of his younger self in its title story song, as he sang “Into the great wide open, under them skies of blue/Out in the great wide open, a rebel without a clue.”. Petty’s image as a benevolent hippie stoner makes him lovable, but it also conceals more than it reveals. There are more profound Tom Petty songs, and much bigger hits. In life, Petty was always there â putting out albums every couple of years, performing summer tours with The Heartbreakers annually, and getting played regularly at every sporting event, county fair, and gas station known to man. (There’s also The Live Anthology, but that’s another story that we’ll get to later.) Only Lynch had enough of an ego to be bothered by that. Turns out that Benmont Tench is one of the greatest rock keyboardists ever! The finished album is very good on its own, but the inclusion of some dance-rock clunkers made with Dave Stewart of Eurhythmics distracted Petty from his original idea. His reflex was to strike against that condescension in anger, but “Southern Accents” derives its power from his unguarded hurt. (They never rocked that hard, for one thing.) The rhythm of “Breakdown” is paced at the same speed as your heart rate the first time you sneak into a bar with a fake I.D. I Loved all his music, his music got me thru some hard times & always thru the good times. “Girl On LSD” apparently was going to be the closing track on the double-album version of Wildflowers, before it was relegated to the B-side of “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” But my favorite version comes from the 1994 Bridge School Benefit, also known as The Heartbreakers’ final shows with Stan Lynch. In a similar vein of “You Got Lucky,” though the pathetic nature of the protagonist is more apparent. Three songs on 1985’s Southern Accents were written by Petty with a new sparring partner, David A. Stewart of Eurythmics. That mythos is baked into the record itself via “Century City,” named after the section of Los Angeles where Petty had to travel every day during the lawsuit to consult with his lawyers. I worry that I’m underrating this song. An American Treasure, the first posthumous Tom Petty project, is designed as an aural biography of the late rocker, telling a tale that begins with a Mudcrutch session from 1974, running through the glory of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers in 1976, and concluding with a live version of "Hungry No More" from 2016, just over a year prior to his tragic 2017 passing. The third single off of Into The Great Wide Open â after “Learning To Fly” and the title track, more to come on both of those songs soon â “Out In The Cold” instantly reminds me of listening to my local classic rock station, WAPL, in the eighth grade. (Axl Rose loved that particular lyric so much that he asked to sing “Free Fallin'” with The Heartbreakers at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.) But … Lynch is actually pretty great? Taking the time to mourn and feel grief is important. But “American Girl” is also about less grand ideas. The implication was that this was lazy songwriting, and a poor attempt to justify rhyming “tattoo” with “too.” My counter-argument was that (obviously) “Into The Great Wide Open” is Tom Petty’s greatest story song, and that this lyric specifically is brilliant because 1) Eddie is precisely the sort of dumb guy who would believe that one should get a tattoo upon immediately arriving in Hollywood and 2) It really would be a sign of fate and true love for a guy like that to meet a woman with exactly the same tattoo. It made you see Tom Petty differently, and it made you see Dave Grohl differently, too. Have her sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the demo version of “Apartment Song,” and this gutting ballad from Hard Promises. Getty Images. Features Best Tom Petty Songs: 20 Essential Solo And Heartbreakers Tracks. and 2) Why would it be noteworthy for him to meet a woman with the same tattoo? What once seemed like an inexhaustible resource has proven to be sadly finite. But early in life, he had to invent himself.”. The Heartbreakers’ LP that followed Mudcrutch, the so-called “blues” album Mojo, was the first time that Petty integrated this new jammy approach into his regular band. No Petty song climbed as high, charted as long or took his unique talent to more people than “Free Fallin’.” An anthem of independence from the day it came out, its spirit has been invoked time and again, on screens big and small in Jerry Maguire and The Sopranos and by Petty and the Heartbreakers themselves, at 2008’s Super Bowl XLII Halftime Show. Reason No. As it is, She’s The One is basically an extension of Wildflowers, with several songs â including the surly breakup song “Hope You Never” â originating from those sessions. Lukas Nelson soulfully breaks this song down into a one man show. Equally important, though, is seeing the light of hope at the end of a tunnel. It’s not that those songs got worse. “Pretend I’m Samuel Clemens / Wear seersucker and white linens.” Sometimes I like to imagine that Tom Petty didn’t actually die, he just decided to disguise himself as Mark Twain and kick it down in Gainesville. You’re not even really singing it, you’re breathing it. Grohl comes in so hard and fast that Mike Campbell actually cracks up. It doesn’t really unfold like a song; it’s more like a memory, or an in-the-moment report of a great night that you know will make an all-time memory you’ll cherish for the rest of your life. The part when he sings, âI love you / Please love me / Iâm not so badâ is definitely the most excruciating seven seconds of any Petty record. In 2017, Byrds co-founder Chris Hillman brought him in for the acclaimed Bidin’ My Time, which turned out to be Petty’s last work. Less a song than an exercise in middle-aged bullshit reduction, “Come On Down To My House” is the first of many examples on this list of Petty â with the possible exception of Neil Young â embracing the energy and influences of each new rock ‘n’ roll generation more effectively than any of his peers. Rewind 10 Seconds. One of the best, really, with an ability to slip into a battery of different voices â the hippie drawl, the punk snarl, the blues purr, the R&B shout â depending on what was required. Instead, “Dreamville” is about a purer, more joyful moment when Petty discovered music and therefore his path in life: “Going down to Lillian’s music store / To buy a black diamond string / Gonna wind it up on my guitar / Gonna make that silver sing.”. It signaled the return of original bassist Ron Blair to replace the ailing Howie Epstein, who sadly died the following year. Corbin Reiff Twitter Music Contributor. Top 50 Tom Petty Songs. Dude kills it on “I Need To Know,” a song that is about nothing other than its own forward momentum. We all want permission to be our best selves, to fulfill our potential, to be loved. Like the girl blasting down the road in Memphis in The Silence Of The Lambs right before she’s kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. Now, to be fair, a lot of people loathe this song. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it seems pretty clear that he was winding down in the years before his passing, as if he was subconsciously preparing for the end. Years before he worked with Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty was inspired to rip off the riff to one of Lynne’s signature songs, “Do Ya,” on this deep cut from Long After Dark. My personal experience with Tom Petty, I’m sure, is pretty typical: Some of my earliest musical memories are hearing songs like “Refugee” and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” on classic rock radio. Truly a pathetic portrait of bachelorhood. Yes, Lynch could apparently be a huge pain in the ass. He and the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. '” Perhaps there are clues to be found in impossibly sunny “California,” an ode to his adopted state written from a lopsided outsider’s perspective. My half-baked theory on “Free Fallin'” is that guy in the song is actually dead and narrating his life from beyond the grave, a la William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Many of the classic songs here established Tom Petty as one of America’s prime exponents of urgent, intelligent, contemporary rock‘n’roll, both with and without the Heartbreakers. For “Luna,” a curveball highlight from the self-titled debut, Lynch collaborated with Petty more closely than usual, knocking out the track while the two musicians were in Tulsa. (Also, the music sounds like the Law & Order theme several years before Law & Order. So it was again on 2002’s The Last DJ, his 11th studio album with the Heartbreakers. ), Because there will be no more Tom Petty tours, I am left contemplating the tours I wish he could have played. I said, ‘Look, this was to illustrate a character. Also an example of how closely Petty came to sounding like a punk in the late ’70s, though the man himself never aspired to that. In the moment, Echo was commonly referred to as Tom Petty’s “divorce” album, coming as it did on the heels of his separation from his first wife, Jane. To paraphrase an observation once made of Jerry Garcia, Tom Petty was the only person who didn’t have the comfort of listening to Tom Petty to make himself feel better. For the first 10 years of my life with Wildflowers, I would often skip “Time To Move On” after “You Don’t Know How It Feels” in order to get to “You Wreck Me.” Now I like “Time To Move On” more than either of those (fantastic) songs. How do you explain “Jammin’ Me” to anyone who wasn’t personally acquainted with the uniquely trivial and gakked-out world of 1987? Online put it. Loved everything you did!!!! Is there a better rock song in which the singer tells off a conceited jerk and warns him to stay away from his woman? Did someone say “epic Mike Campbell outro guitar solo”? Even though Campbell is a “song first” guitarist who’s normally averse to showboating, he’s still often afforded a showcase in Tom Petty songs, i.e. (McGuinn swiftly recorded his own version of “American Girl” and put it out the year after the original.) Rewind 10 Seconds. 70. “He was ambitious and scared, making damn sure you think he’s not either one,” Lynch says of Petty in Warren Zanes’ book. In the box set’s liner notes, Petty says this furious, blissfully dumb rock song was inspired by Nirvana, who “kicked us in the ass” in the early ’90s. The pecking order in The Heartbreakers seemed to be constant for much of their history: Petty, then Mike Campbell, then Benmont Tench, then everybody else. Ultimately, so many people from different generations, men and women alike, gravitated to Tom Petty because you can sense that goodness in songs like “Two Gunslingers.”. Put this thoroughly charming song in the former camp. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head.” How does that happen? That version doesn’t groove near as hard as the hit version from Damn The Torpedoes. There’s been a lot of discussion on this list so far about songwriting. Appropriately enough, “A Woman In Love” was cuckolded on the charts by “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the song Tom gave to his friend Stevie Nicks. His band might have been The Heartbreakers, but some Petty songs are all about love. His last great moment on record. This nostalgic tribute to Petty’s hometown was recorded for Echo and apparently forgotten until it was dug out for An American Treasure. I imagine this will be my most controversial Top 10 choice. To this day, it’s hard to believe that the anthemic “American Girl” never showed on that US chart at all. Heard now, “I Forgive It All” (from Mudcrutch’s 2, his final studio record) feels like a definitive closing statement, like Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart,” though perhaps with a smidge less self-awareness. Petty recorded a number of hit singles with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist.