“He takes things even higher”: The Elvis Presley song Tom Petty called heavenly
Tom Petty was just 11 years old when Elvis Presley changed his life—not in a typical way most people were captivated by hearing hits like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ on the radio but in a much more personal and profound way. Petty actually met Elvis in person as a young boy, an experience that left him completely mesmerised. “He arrived in a fleet of white Cadillacs,” Petty later recalled. “His hair was so black that the sunshine was glowing off of it. Just a nod and a hello made your skin tingle. I was high for weeks. It lit a fever in me to get every record I could, and I really digested it.”
In the years that followed, Petty built an entire career based on recreating the same feeling of elation, using Presley as a springboard to catapult himself to unexpected heights. Presley brought with him a specific lesson in the transformative power of instinctual creativity, reinterpreting genres and sounds to make them appear accessible and transcendent while maintaining raw emotional appeal.
For Petty, learning this would be the key to gaining his own success while embodying the vessel for something greater—capturing the essence of yearning, hope, and redemption—and would lead him to build experiences that connected with his audience deeply. In the eyes of many, including Petty, Presley was the first to master the art of explosive charisma, not just in his performances but in how he approached music.
While many of his notes have since been criticised for being less original than they initially seemed, Presley acknowledged his position with modesty, occasionally shifting a dance move here or a lyric there to repackage songs or ideas in a fresh demeanour. This ultimately united more audiences, blending diverse musical traditions and making genres like blues, country, and gospel more accessible to everybody.
One of Petty’s favourite Presley songs, and perhaps the one he feels best reflects who he was as an artist and visionary, was his version of Smiley Lewis’s ‘One Night of Sin’. This song had been recorded, shelved, scheduled, and then shelved again on and off since materialising in early 1957, but Presley consistently felt dissatisfied with it because he felt it was missing something.
In a bold move, he soon decided to shift part of the lyrics around, changing it from “one night of sin” to “one night with you”, a subtle tweak that saw the musician turning the song from a lament of regret into a heartfelt plea, giving it a more romantic and almost spiritual tone. By reshaping the emotional core of the song, Presley pushed it into new territory, taking a beloved tune and giving it an unexpected turn.
For Petty, this demonstrated his prowess at adopting various musical shifts and creating a kind of unpredictable uplift in his songs. “[He changed the line to] “One night with you is what I’m praying for,” which is great,” Petty told Rolling Stone. “It starts as a standard blues, but then he takes things even higher with the bridge, which leaps out of the song. You’re not expecting that, and it’s heavenly.”
This is also likely what caused Petty to regard Presley as an inexplicably revolutionary artist from such a young age. Presley, to him, was someone who was constantly finding ways to elevate the music he touched while maintaining an element of familiarity. Somehow, even with the most mundane of tracks, Presley was able to brush it with a stroke of magic, lathering it in extra layers of resonance and making it linger for just a little longer.
