The 1989 album Tom Petty actually enjoyed his voice on: “Sounds better”
Tom Petty didn’t need to pride himself on having the greatest singing voice in the world.
Heartland rock is built off of the songs before anything else, and you can hear Petty talking about the real troubles that everyone that he grew up with had whenever they started making a life for themselves outside of high school. But after working on some of the biggest records of his career, it was only a matter of time before Petty started to hone his chops a little bit more whenever he opened his mouth.
Then again, it’s not like rock and roll was known for people who took precious care of their voice by any stretch. Little Richard was pushing himself to the brink every single time he wrote one of his tunes, and even though Petty wasn’t that kind of singer by any stretch, there was a good chance that he wasn’t going to be caught running through musical scales every single time he played some of those first bar gigs.
He only sang from the gut whenever he got to the microphone, and you can really feel that when you look at how angry he was during his first tunes. His music had a lot more to do with old-school rock and roll, but when you listen to the way that he sings tunes like ‘Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)’, he sounds absolutely pissed on the studio version of that tune. But when you sing like that for so long, you only have a few years before your voice comes back to bite you in the ass.
And on the tour for Damn the Torpedoes, Petty’s voice started to crack just a little bit. He was still able to scream at the top of his lungs when he wanted to, but after going through the hell of having to work with lawyers on getting his songs back, his voice did end up giving out more than a few times on the road for that record. He did eventually nurse it back to health, but it was going to be a few more years before he found the kind of person who could help him truly refine his singing.
Stevie Nicks had a completely different tone that made him start thinking about his singing differently, but Jeff Lynne was something else entirely. Petty had already been fascinated with Lynne’s work when listening to ELO’s finest records, but when you look at the work that he put in on Petty’s first solo album, you could hear him slowly start to take a look at what he could do with his voice.
He had a lot of potential as a singer, and even if he had to work for the vocal take on ‘I Won’t Back Down’, he felt that he came out of his first proper solo outing as a completely different singer, saying at the time, “I think my voice sounds better, fuller. That started from me singing to Jeff Lynne on the sofa a few years ago, and he’d say, ‘I want your voice to sound just like that on the record.'”
Concluding, “We first did that on ‘Free Fallin”, and I thought it was such a nice warm sound – without any special effects on the voice, just naked-that I stayed with it.”
It was a nice start, but some of the best parts of his career were when he would take his voice later. That naked feeling is all over his voice on Wildflowers, but even when working with Lynne again on Into the Great Wide Open, you can hear him try to push his voice into the harshest parts of his range, whether that’s soaring above everything on ‘All Or Nothin’ and ‘You and I Will Meet Again’ or getting in touch with his heavy side on ‘Out in the Cold’.
And Petty never really took that for granted, given that most of his contemporaries tend to either take their songs down a few keys or lose their voice entirely by the end. He still wanted to make the best music that he could, and when you listen to a tune like ‘I Should’ve Known It’, you can hear him using all of those lessons that he was taught when working with his English friend on that first solo album.
