Watch Phoebe Bridgers cover Tom Petty & The Heartbreaker’s ‘It’ll All Work Out’
If there’s one artist you can count on to turn a piece of classic songwriting into a thick, shimmering vapour, it’s Pheobe Bridgers. When it comes to weaving dulcet tones with introspective and perenially-relatable lyrics, Bridgers is top dog. Here, she offers up a particularly atmospheric rendition of Tom Petty and The Heartbreaker’s ‘It’ll All Work Out’.
Featured on Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), ‘It’ll All Work Out’ was inspired by Petty’s separation from his wife, Jane, during the making of the album. It’s a rare example of a breakup song written without bitterness. Petty could easily have used the bluegrass instrumentation on this track as a thicket to hide behind. But instead, he makes himself incredibly vulnerable, noting how “When it mattered most, I let her down.”
Unlike some of Petty’s better-known hits, ‘It’ll All Work Out’ has aged remarkably well. With Mike Campbell’s tender Mandolin part and Howie Epstein’s tight harmonies, it’s easy to see why Petty dubbed this song “one of my favourites ever. It’s a durable song. I don’t think it was about [the separation] necessarily, but that inspired it.”
Let Me Up, The Heartbreaker’s seventh studio album, marked a change in their approach to recording. When they started work on the album in 1986, they already knew that they wanted it to sound like a live recording. Though their previous album, Southern Accents, had been heavily produced, they’d spent the last year touring as Bob Dylan’s backing band, an experience which clearly rubbed off on them.
The simplicity of ‘It’ll Work Out’ is precisely what makes it so rife for re-imagining. Here, Phoebe Bridgers strips away everything, bar the essentials. With just an electric guitar for support, she stretches and kneads Petty’s melodies, bathing them in a hefty dose of reverb for added effect. This particular recording was taken during Bridger’s opening set for The War On Drugs’ show in Portland, Oregon, way back in 2017 – shortly after the release of her debut solo album, Stranger In The Alps.
Make sure you check out the rendition if you haven’t already.
