Listen to isolated vocals of Tom Petty on ‘I Won’t Back Down’
Every great song only needs the bare essentials. Outside of the millions of add-ons that can be used in the studio, any great song just needs a voice and an acoustic guitar to make the listener feel the emotion behind the tune. In the case of Tom Petty, though, all that you really need is a voice to tell the story.
Although Full Moon Fever benefited from piling one overdubbed guitar on top of another courtesy of Jeff Lynne, Petty’s raw vocal is the main ingredient that holds everything together. Though Petty’s voice was once backhandedly described as “Bob Dylan if he sounded in tune”, the real grit behind his voice set him apart from the rest.
While Petty was born and bred out of the same heartland that Bruce Springsteen was singing about, the determination in his voice is more upfront, having an authority in his lyrical approach that most rockers haven’t hit on since the days of Johnny Cash. Of course, it would make sense that Cash would eventually cover this Petty classic, doing his friend justice with his more lived-in take on the song. Although the track sounds like Petty has control over the situation, he originally considered ditching the material altogether.
When he first laid down the track, Petty had some hangups about ‘I Won’t Back Down’ being too honest and expressed the need to disguise it a little bit more. Once he heard the finished take, he said: “I’m glad I didn’t go back and edit it. It is very much like me”. That’s not to say that the song didn’t have a few touch-ups along the way. When Petty was working the song out on his own, his friend George Harrison had an issue with the placeholder lyric “standing on the edge of the world”. Thinking that it was a little too corny to be coming out of Tom Petty, Harrison talked him out of using the line, which Petty replaced with “there ain’t no easy way out”.
While not hearing some of Mike Campbell’s signature guitar twinkles might sound strange, Petty tells the entire story of this song just through his voice. The core message behind the tune was always about sticking to your guns in the face of adversity, and Petty rides the line of being both emotionally vulnerable and determined at the same time.
That kind of attitude was practically the mission statement of the entire album. Tom Petty had always been comfortable as a member of the Heartbreakers, and his first step into being truly solo was an experiment to see what he had to say on his own. Even when he notched up songs like ‘Free Fallin’, the label still wasn’t impressed, thinking that the record wouldn’t sell and trying to minimize the exposure it would get.
Thanks to some iconic music videos and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ featuring Ringo Starr and George Harrison, the album went supernova, giving Petty a career renaissance that he would ride for the next decade on albums like Wildflowers. Life has a habit of taking you in multiple different directions, but as long as Petty is at the wheel, you don’t need to worry about a thing.
