The album Tom Petty didn’t enjoy creating: “This is a bad thing”
Not being inspired tends to be the kiss of death for any artist looking to make magic in the studio. It’s one thing to get frustrated with how a track is coming along in the studio, but the minute that an artist says that they don’t know where to go, it’s usually time to either take a step away for a bit or just scrap the idea altogether to work on something different. Although Tom Petty had already done most of the leg work when working on the soundtrack to She’s the One, he wasn’t exactly thrilled when called into the studio to assemble everything.
This is strange since Petty had made the studio his glorified office when working on Wildflowers. Since he was already looking at a messy divorce about to come his way, the music practically served as therapy for him whenever he went into the studio, oftentimes looking to channel his feelings into his songs rather than talk about them.
Even though the record was pretty much flawless by Petty’s standards, he still had many tunes sitting in the backlog. Sure, there wasn’t a chance of ‘Girl on LSD’ making it on the record, but even that subtle piss-take is 95% better than almost anything that Bruce Springsteen was putting out around that time.
Although a soundtrack album would have been a perfect way for Petty to eliminate some of the odds and ends, it must have been like a parent watching their children leave home for the last time. After all, soundtrack albums are usually where songs go to die and are hardly ever heard again, and while lead single ‘Walls (Circus)’ is among Petty’s best ballads of the time, it was no ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
Then again, most of the album doesn’t feel like a proper record from front to back. Obviously, Petty wanted to make songs that would go along with the movie, but many tracks seem to work as individual vignettes rather than just a great song, like the rockabilly-tinged ‘Zero From Outer Space’ or his cover of Beck’s ‘Asshole’.
Half of the track listing is still fairly solid, but when Petty attempted to call up other people to work on it, he realised that the project might not have been the best idea, saying, “I started to do it I realized, ‘This is a bad thing.’ Because I know these people don’t want to give anything good. Who wants to give their best stuff away, right? And those albums just really suck, every fucking one of them. So I just took a bunch of stuff that I had leftover from Wildflowers and I hastily did a couple more tracks.”
Even if the album constitutes just a bunch of leftovers, it would have been a crime if some of them never saw the light of day. ‘Angel Dream’ is one of the most gentle ballads that Petty ever made, and even if it didn’t fit on Wildflowers, hearing Ringo Starr and Carl Wilson guest on the song ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ is the kind of star power far too big to be considered obscure.
She’s the One is far from the greatest look at what Petty has to offer, but for anyone who considers themselves a diehard fan of his, it’s a unique glimpse into what his process is like behind the scenes. Despite the movie itself not being awfully memorable, no one would get a tune like ‘Walls’ out of their head if they tried.
