10 songs that Tom Petty should have never released

‘Airport’ – Songs from She’s The One

Tom Petty was always a man of many strengths, but he never felt comfortable working in the world of film. He had the odd role in movies like Waterworld, but considering how he felt working on the soundtrack to She’s the One, he was more than happy to throw together whatever he had left after he finished Wildflowers. And while that makes the record a backdoor sequel to one of his greatest albums, the ending of the record is where things start to peeter out a little bit.

As if it wasn’t clear by the fact that ‘Walls’ and ‘Angel Dream’ are on the album twice, this was the kind of album that should have featured many different guest stars but got turned into a Petty outing by accident. While his covers of Lucinda Williams and Beck are pretty good, ‘Airport’ feels like the worst kind of soundtrack fodder, featuring Benmont Tench mucking around with a little piano interlude that wouldn’t feel out of place in a scene where people are awkwardly stuck in an elevator.

But as a postscript for the album, the whole thing feels shallow coming after the song ‘Hung Up and Overdue’. Petty already brought the entire project to a sweeping finish, but instead of the epic final bow to close things off on, this feels like a trip through the musical “closing credits” of the album, which makes it one of the least necessary parts of Petty’s songs.

‘Lover’s Touch’ – Mojo

Like so many of his contemporaries before and after him, Petty knew how to get a lot more bluesy in his old age. He was always eyeing up the biggest names in blues by working with old-school classic rock acts like Carl Perkins, but by the time he reached albums like Hypnotic Eye, he found a way to combine those textures with the gritty garage rock of his early days. That wouldn’t have happened without Mojo coming first, but ‘Lover’s Touch’ is a good symptom of the album’s problems: its length.

Considering how much meat there is on the record, ‘Lover’s Touch’ feels like covering ground that was already dealt with on tunes like ‘Trip To Pirate’s Cove’. Despite managing to get a song based on one chord to sound fantastic on ‘US 41’, Petty seemed to have the basis of a decent song and didn’t have a hook to string everything together, instead electing to put some old-school echo and bypass filter on his voice to make it sound a lot more sinister than it was before.

But Petty never dealt with that kind of gruff vocal before. If he was going to go for gritty, he would paint you a picture akin to something seen in an old-school Western, but like a lot of the modern takes on the genre today, ‘Lover’s Touch’ was the first time Petty felt like he was favouring style over substance. The licks are still great, but the song is nowhere near those bluesy freakouts he got up to back in the day.

‘The Damage You’ve Done’ – Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)

By the end of the band’s tour with Bob Dylan, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) couldn’t have been a more pertinent title for Petty. He still had a few great songs in his arsenal, but the heartland rocker never looked back on this record all that fondly, chalking it up to burnout after coming off of playing with his fellow Wilbury and dealing with his house burning down. Even though the record still had its fair share of surprises, ‘The Damage You’ve Done’ is the kind of tune that the band could practically write in their sleep.

And that’s because they basically did. According to Petty, learning to play with Dylan made them incredibly tight, and what you’re hearing on the finished version is the band’s first full playthrough of the song in the studio. While it’s impressive that they could still sound this solid after only hearing the tune once, there’s not enough of a song there, only pivoting between two chords throughout the verse and chorus and Petty talking about how bitter he is about being left on his ass.

A song this sparse can work with the right kind of delivery, but whereas Stevie Nicks turned this kind of track into pure beauty on ‘Dreams,’ there’s some secondhand boredom coming from the instrumentation as if you can see them looking at their watches wondering when lunch is going to be. Despite the Heartbreakers feeling like one big happy family, this is the first time they sounded like they didn’t want to be in the room together.

‘Between Two Worlds’ – Long After Dark

There was never a moment during his career when Petty didn’t get to call his own shots. Some of his best records were when he was working on his own and not giving a damn about what his label wanted, but when he got too comfortable is normally when things began to stumble. And after working with Jimmy Iovine one too many times, Long After Dark is where he first got a significant case of the bloat.

Which is strange, considering how short this album is. The whole thing is only ten tracks long, but ‘Between Two Worlds’ is the best example of how overblown things had become. Although there aren’t as many synthesisers as there were on tracks like ‘You Got Lucky,’ hearing the band drone on for five minutes on a song that could have been done after three minutes makes them sound like they are trying to create some grand epic from scratch.

In Petty’s own words, though, rock and roll records were supposed to be somewhat cheap, and hearing him try his best to make something with a build feels stagnant after a while, as if Stan Lynch can’t get the rhythm section out of second gear. There are pieces of the song that could have been folded into another tune, but it’s also no wonder why they wanted to take a quantum leap away from that sound on Southern Accents.

‘Something in the Air’ – Greatest Hits

The fact that Petty’s Greatest Hits album is one of his most profitable releases was probably enough to get under his skin. He was against the idea of putting out a best-of record and was even more disgusted at the idea of his label forcing him to record another potential single for it when he was knee-deep in Wildflowers. While ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ did manage to become one of his last immaculate singles with MCA, ‘Something In the Air’ is the definition of a filler track on the backend of the record.

That’s not to say that the band are doing a terrible version of the tune or anything. The Thunderclap Newman take on ‘Something In the Air’ is still a timeless piece of 1960s-style rock and roll, and the band do a great job at recreating the jangle of the original, even down to the arpeggiated guitar line that sounds like The Byrds. In fact, the whole thing might end up working a bit too well.

As much as the band have worked on great cover songs in the past, this is a case where the Heartbreakers’ version is too similar to the version that everyone knows from the 1960s, to the point where it sounds like another band’s greatest hit ended up on their album by accident. It’s still a decent tune, but it’s never a good sign when a cover makes you want to go listen to the original again.

‘Make It Better (Forget About Me)’ – Southern Accents

For someone who simply played guitar for most of his career, Petty translated very well to the 1980s era of MTV. Even though the band weren’t pinup stars by any stretch of the imagination, hearing them cut loose when making videos like ‘You Got Lucky’ was half the reason people got to appreciate their charm back in the day. It was also the era of excess, though, and if the band were already bad boys, ‘Make It Better’ is the sound of what happens when they start overdoing it a little too much.

The band were all off their faces on cocaine when recording most of Southern Accents, but while they managed to clean up enough to create a pretty decent record, ‘Make It Better’ is one of the most forgettable pieces that Petty ever wrote. It’s clear that he wanted to write something in the style of Memphis soul to tie into the Southern theme, but the Steve Cropper-esque guitar hook is the only thing that works.

And while this shouldn’t play a factor, the music video is also one of the most perplexing of Petty’s career, featuring him playing inside the ear of the model featured in the video for ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More.’ Then again, if you needed any more of a clue as to why the band were high out of their minds, I don’t think that you could possibly think of a better visual to go along with it.

‘Crystal River’ – Mudcrutch

Every rocker of Petty’s generation always grows fonder of those days when they were kids trying to figure out how music worked. The entire mentality behind all of his songs was to make something that touches people, but when working in his baby band, Mudcrutch, Petty was still a snot-nosed kid trying to figure out what rock and roll was all about. And while him reuniting with his old bandmates was a nice gesture back in the day, it did have a few rough spots like any other reunion.

Although the band’s entire debut record is a fairly solid slice of country rock, ‘Crystal River’ is where things grind to a halt for a minute. As much as ‘Shady Grove’ or ‘Lover of the Bayou’ let them spread out a little bit more, their decision to stretch out this song for over nine minutes kills the record’s momentum right as it gets started.

While Petty had been known to cover acts like The Grateful Dead in the past, this is the kind of tune ripped straight out of the worst Allman Brothers Band jam ever made, with none of the slide licks that made Duane a legend in their time. Since Petty always wanted to run away from those types of jam bands, hearing him try his best to hold a tune together for the length of an average prog rock makes him look way out of his depth.

‘Cool Dry Place’ – Traveling Wilburys Vol 2

There’s normally a different set of rules for everyone working on a Traveling Wilburys record. No one gets to rub elbows with Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan by being merely good, and even if the song isn’t among the greatest you’ve ever written, anyone in Petty’s position was going to need to show their stuff. After Orbison passed away between the band’s two records, though, hearing Petty limp to the finish line on ‘Cool Dry Place’ is a little too middle-aged than what the band was going for.

While there was an adorable charm to seeing the biggest names in rock and roll make music together, hearing Petty sing about moving different pieces of furniture around to fit his guitars in his house is one of the more juvenile lyrics he ever wrote. This kind of charm worked when Paul McCartney wrote ‘Fixing A Hole’, but hearing Petty sing about the same thing feels like he’s shooting for Harrison’s ‘Blow Away’ but falling a bit short.

Although the song is saved by some decent acoustic guitar lines sprinkled throughout, there isn’t much to go on except for Jeff Lynne’s production style. Still, for a project that was all about bringing together the best songwriters on the planet, the fact that this was the bottom of the barrel for them is a testament to how many great tunes they could throw together on a whim.

‘I Don’t Wanna Fight’ – Echo

If there were ever to be a biopic made about Petty’s life, Echo would be the dark night of the soul. Although there was a lot more nuance to his time in the spotlight, hearing about him retreating to a chicken shack following his messy divorce marks one of the lowest emotional points he ever dropped to. And while it made the record he made difficult to listen to, the music sounds honest except for one track.

Right when everyone’s prepared to listen to a song about Petty’s domestic issues, Mike Campbell starts singing instead. The whole point behind the track may have been about how Petty is a lover who would do anything to win his wife back, but given the fact that he’s not singing on it, Petty either sounds too tuned out to care or is not in a good frame of mind to be singing those lyrics.

Although he only added the line “I’m a lover” to Campbell’s original demo, it’s so sad to see Petty get so low that he couldn’t show up for every track on the album. As much as he loved the idea of channelling his pain through music, this is the clearest example of what Petty called being “at the wheel but [not] driving the car.”

‘Zombie Zoo’ – Full Moon Fever

Not many artists go into their records knowing that they are going to be classics. If anyone realised that one of their projects was going to define what they mean to legions of fans around the world, chances are they would still be working on it to this day and never release it until it was perfect. But the beauty of Full Moon Fever is it sounds like it was done over a weekend, and that means some of the pieces that should have been on the cutting room floor got past Petty and Jeff Lynne.

Since most of the record is a breezy good time listening to them go back and forth on different tunes, ‘Zombie Zoo’ brings everything to a screeching halt at the bottom of the record. While there is some real star power in getting Roy Orbison to add some backing vocals, the whole track is too lighthearted and goofy to wrap up an album that was all about showing a new side of Petty like on ‘Yer So Bad’ and ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream.’

And now that we know the different timeline that Petty envisioned, it only makes the final album a little bit worse. Petty had said many times before that he meant to put the song ‘Waiting For Tonight’ as the final track on the record with The Bangles singing backup with him, and seeing how well that song perfectly ties up everything about the record, it makes ‘Zombie Zoo’ look like the B-side that should have never had a shot at the big time.