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What’s Your Favorite Tom Petty Song?

American Polymath’s panel of experts sets out to answer the first of our monthly "your favorites" questions: What’s Your Favorite Tom Petty Song?

"Southern Accents"
Ever since I’ve moved north of Mason and Dixon, I’ve been chided and derided in much the same way as my fellow North Floridian, Tom Petty. "There’s a Southern Accent where I come from. The young’uns call it country. The Yankees call it dumb." Petty tells you the way it is far more clearly than Skynyrd did when they love-tapped Neil Young in "Sweet Home Alabama." It’s not personal with Petty. It’s a universal claim to cultural legitimacy.

By the way, Skynyrd’s best song about the South is "Simple Man."
-Francis Lilley

"I Won’t Back Down"
"I won't back down."  It’s a simple American message.  I will not back down, regardless of circumstance or opposition.   It's a nice feeling.  When you listen to this song, you can go chop a whole bunch of wood.
-Dominic Desjardins

"Wildflowers"
In my mind, I run through the fields, the flowers.  I feel alive.  If only I could take on the brightness of the wildflowers, and SHINE, SHINE, SHINE.  I belong somewhere I feel free.  Tom Petty told me so.
-Nora Locken

"Free Fallin"
I'm tempted to say that my favorite Tom song is "American Girl" just because I'll forever associate it with that scene in Silence of The Lambs where plump damsel Catherine Martin sings along to it right before getting kidnapped by tuck-dancing-to-Goodbye Horses enthusiast Buffalo Bill. This was especially true during the '08 Primaries when Hillary Clinton would use it at her speeches, causing me to break into laughter every time.

However, I can't in good conscience pick anything other than "Free Fallin'." I realize the conventional wisdom goes that Tom Petty has never written a classic album, or perhaps even a classic song. That may be true, but I consider "Free Fallin'" a genuine American standard. It could just be because it's the one tune of his that everyone seems to know the words to (or at least the first verse).

I think what sells the tune is that it's the one song where everything that's good about Petty just clicks in such a wonderful way that it instantly transcends his otherwise adequate folk-pop-rocking. It draws you in right away with it's gorgeous 12-string acoustic riff. From there, it's just one beautiful arrangement touch after another, my favorite being that wonderful "Ventura Boulevard" harmony. The nicest touch, though, has to be Petty's vocal. While on his other tunes he sings in his (again, perfectly adequate) voice, his take on "Free Fallin'" is so subtly mournful and stirring that it's no wonder we all sing along.
-Mike Gormly

"Listen to Her Heart"
Track two on side two of the Heartbreakers’ second album, You’re Gonna Get It!, “Listen to Her Heart” offers an early hint of the Roger McGuinn-like jangle-pop which came to characterize the band’s sound. “Listen to Her Heart” opens with a lyric which synopsizes the spirit of the times on the eve of the Reagan Revolution: “You think you’re gonna take her away with your money and your cocaine.”

Listening to the song on repeat all afternoon leads me to believe that Petty intended it as more than a nod to the brooding twang of the Byrds. “Listen to Her Heart” also suggests the swagger of Motown Records’ golden age. I envision producers Denny Cordell and Noah Shark convincing Petty to keep the song in line with the thirty-minute-long album’s nine other tight rockers. Somewhere in the Petty archives, a demo of the song exists which sounds more like the Supremes than it does “Bells of Rhymney.” Following the opening “your money and your cocaine” lyrics, Petty included a “woo-woo” he pinched from “You Keep Me Hanging On.” Petty likely dressed up as Diana Ross for the recording session and hired Mary Wilson to sing backup for good measure.
-Clayton Trutor

"The Waiting"
No stranger to Roger McGuinn-style jangle guitar, Petty begins ‘The Waiting’ from 1981’s Hard Promises, with a half-time, counter-picked, Rickenbacker line that serves as the pedal for the song’s distinctive super-imposition of country upon the chugging beat of rhythm and blues.

Being born a guitar player, raised as a bass player and having matured into a keyboardist, it is the order of entry into the song’s performance for each instrument that can demarkate my own musicial upbringing. Petty and Mike Campbell’s complimentary guitar lines provide the first statement and interpretation of the piece’s main melody. It is Ron Blair, not Howie Epstein, bassist for the renowned Heartbreakers group, and later ex-Johnny Cash son-in-law, who provides the simple and understated bassline the sets the table for Campbell’s lead frills and keyboardist Benmont Tench’s Hammond B3 organ, reminiscent of Al Kooper’s work on Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’

It is the song’s opening line that immediately grabs the listener’s attention by setting them back on their heels by its frankness and tone:

“Oh baby don’t it feel like hell right now,
Don’t it feel like something from a dream...”

Straight away, Petty and his gang of Gainesville compatriots provide a bleak, off-putting image, counterpoint to that of the melody- both steady and carefree.

At first inspection, ‘The Waiting’ appears to be a song about love and relationships. Is it the waiting to hear back from a potential love interest that is the hardest part? Hardly. Luckily, Petty eschews this controlling metaphor of pop music in favor of a more nuanced understanding of waiting and expectation. To Mr. Petty, the writer, the waiting is felt on a fuller and deeper level. It is at once the waiting of a youth to coming to terms with lack of knowledge of a greater world view, as well as the expectation for life lessons yet to come. Petty is able to typify the understanding that, a young person, although they may not yet fully comprehend the world around them, when looking back realizes how very far they have come along.

As was commonplace in his lyrical output, on ‘The Waiting,’ Petty was able to add a certain degree of levity to his written text through the interjection of folksy aphorisms such as “crying fool.“ Perhaps hoping to align himself with, then fledgling everyman, Bruce Springsteen, Petty extends the waiting metaphor/analog to include gambling, saying that “everyday you see one more card.”

It is the historical context of ‘The Waiting’ that provides yet another clue to its meaning. In early 1981, MCA Records, the Heartbreakers’distributor, in an attempt to better monetize some its premiere acts, raised album prices by $1 for artists such as mainstay artists such as Jeff Lynne’s ELO and Steely Dan. Following a bitter dispute and a refusal by both Petty and producer Jimmy Iovine (yes, that Jimmy Iovine) to deliver the completed album in accord with the planned yearly release calendar, MCA Records backed down and sold the record for the industry-standard price.

Petty and the Heartbreakers were celebrated for standing up and fighting against what they, and many others, saw as an a foolish attempt by record companies to impose un-realistic demands on the consumer for the sale of creative art. On the release’s cover, Petty is photographed in a record store, sourcing his solidarity with the record buying public.

The purposeful placement of the first track, ‘The Waiting,’ was seen by many fans and critics as a none-too-subtle reference to the time the record company was forced to remain in waiting for the release of the album’s master tapes.
-Nicholas Farrell

"Don't Do Me Like That"

The Metonymies, Tom Petty, and the Disembodiment of the Analog

Can't you feel it? How we've already surrendered contact with what we can no longer name, in this the late stages of an exodus, a mass disembodiment? We don't live in bodies anymore, but wade out deep into the simulacrum of the digital, euphoric, then turn to disembodied voices to assure us that nothing has changed but the media themselves, and that we still have a life. If the metaphors won't save us, maybe the metonymies can.

Damn the Torpedoes. October 1979. Back in the day, back in the analog world. On the cover, a preternaturally wizened former Floridian (Florida was still a place then), his shoulders about a foot wide, in fuchsia T-shirt against a fuchsia photographer's backdrop. "Don't Do Me Like That." It should be selling Mountain Dew. The way they did us with "Love Train" and Busch Lite. Windows XP and "Heroes." The nostalgia pimps won't stop until they've scraped clean the uteral lining of the psyche.

The body remembers minor rituals, rising from the couch, the decantation of the record from the cardboard slip, the maddenings of the paper sleeve. The muscles of the forearm anxious over the lowering of the stylus. Pop, sizzle, pop, snap—music of the spheres, even in the hushed pause before the music begins, the needle riding the sheen out beyond the grooves, seeking purchase there. I don't have a vinyl collection. I don't pretend to be immune. I don't write with a No. 2 Ticonderoga on yellow legal pads and then have my wife type it up like Wendell Berry. I know one thing in the youth of my old age: that you have to lose your life to save it. To know what a body is, you have to leave yours behind.

See me queasy among the vestiges of the lost world, frittering Sundays away in the brick mill flea markets of New Bedford. An abortive impulse errant among cooling ganglia. I finger the Bakelite dials of meaningless machines, oiled calipers of indeterminate purpose, green-frosted oscilloscope lenses caked with dried mud, and cardboard Canadian Club boxes serving as "paper lots." On the gritty floor, I'm kneeling now. A letter from March 1903, the cursive gorgeous, with curlicued descenders like curves of morning glory tendrils. A chrome and brown plastic reel-to-reel whose stiff on/off button delivers the most soul satisfying click. A leather-bound sex manual from the 1930s with a bullet hole in it, opened to the page where the bullet stopped, the bullet gone. Damn the Torpedoes.
-Pete Duval

Undecided…
“I Won’t Back Down” and “Free Fallin” stretch each other into a remarkably taut tension. The delicately crooned “I Won’t Back Down” is Petty’s most inspiring yet most defiant tune. It made Petty, the sultan of simple songs, a fixture on the charts in 1989. He channels his inner Isaiah in “I Won’t Back Down,” “setting his face like a flint” against all opposition. Isaiah, however, only faced ridicule, ostracism, torture, and the threat of death. Petty sees this inner strength, and raises the venerable prophet one, declaring "stand me up at the gates of hell.” He offers straightforward, easily relatable inspiration. If any snob is game to gainsay, he'll call their bluff. He's already raised a persecuted prophet and stood up to the gates of hell, so a twenty-first century critic won't trouble him much.

That said, it is unclear whether Petty began "Free Fallin’" because Satan burst from Hell to cast him into outer darkness or whether he actually became a liar and "backed down" to the point of committing suicide by jumping off a cliff. In the supremely simple chord progression, Petty bequeaths to generations the ability to feel like they can play the guitar as they effortlessly move their pinky finger from D to Dsus (if you want the actual chord you will need to put a capo on the fourth fret). This isn't just about some contemporary notion of self-esteem. There are tangible results. The enterprising teenage male now adds to his arsenal not only the ability to impress women, by playing guitar at them, he can now teach them something on the guitar creating a viable, intersubjective relationship based on music. Either way, Petty's eschewing of musical complexity exponentially increases the chances of a make-out session, whether in the woods or in the basement and everyone can have high school memories only slightly more earthy than The OC.
-J.G. Koefoed