The Art of Timelessness: The era of music Tom Petty said everybody laughed at
What makes a piece of music timeless? Other than being something of a throwaway term, it’s actually one of the hardest things to get right. And Tom Petty knows that better than anybody.
Everybody has a different view of what makes timeless music these days. One recent Reddit post says Taylor Swift is the most timeless musician ever. Although the roars of disagreement can practically be heard at such a scandalous statement, they do have a bit of point. Swift does all the things you’d probably guess so-called timeless music has, like formulaic pop structures, ambiguous lyrics, and catchy, accessible melodies.
But the fact that such a hot take pisses off so many people also says a lot about how we feel about the concept of something being timeless. Swift and countless pop stars do the same things musicians have done time and time again across countless eras. But is that a guarantee of an eternal shelf life? Not exactly, but it’s a good place to start, and that’s saying something. Because most of what we also call some of the best music of all time – that still holds up today – are the ones people probably thought were fairly niche at the time.
Or at the very least, attached to a certain cultural moment. Or worse, music that hops onto a fad or technological development that is already dated almost the moment it arrives. But weirdly, some of these are also the pieces that accidentally struck magic, even though the nature of the melodies or lyrics seems misplaced in any other place than where they came from. Like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. That song will never go away, and it was literally written about moments in history that defined Billy Joel’s life.
But maybe that’s a good place to start, too. Somewhere real, even if it’s specific to a political or cultural development. The point is, no one really knows what makes music timeless until it just is. And even then, it’s not really clear why we hold on to some songs and not others. We love to call The Beatles timeless, and yet it’s virtually impossible to find a good remastered version of their stuff. Some things never die because they just have that inexplicable magic, and we like to veil it with different labels to make it all make sense.
But according to Tom Petty, it’s all far simpler than that. In his view, it’s all about the methods you use, and if you rely too heavily on certain kinds of tech, then you’re already setting yourself up to fail. If you jump on trends and use certain equipment, you’re already halfway to becoming dated. He even went as far as to say that’s the reason why we look at some music from the 1980s and can’t take it seriously, because people were just trying way too hard.
“I think that those people who went for the sequencers and the synthesisers at the time really dated themselves by doing that,” Petty told Jim DeRogatis in 2003. “We always saw them as not timeless instruments. We stay organic; if we want to make a synthesiser sound, we’ll find some organic way to do it. Those computer instruments seem to date themselves, and if you look back at a lot of that music from the ’80s, you almost kind of laugh at it. It’s very much of an era, and I think the best songs are kind of timeless. They last a long time.”
To be fair, if there’s one person who knows his stuff when it comes to this, it’s Petty. Most of his catalogue is hard to place, and that’s also what they tend to say about timeless music. If you can’t figure out what date it was released, you’ve already won. And with Petty, there’s always been this weird atmosphere around it all where it feels like it’s from everywhere and nowhere. And maybe, considering what he said in 2003, it was about knowing how to use “organic” ways to tell stories without leaning into the zeitgeist of the time.
