The song Tom Petty said he was “lucky” to have written
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers wrote the track for the album Transmission Impossible in 2015 and attempted something seldom succeeded in music: the art of story songs. Petty’s successful storytelling in ‘Something Big’ is illustrative of the artist’s potent lyrical abilities.
“It didn’t feel like Sunday, didn’t feel like June, When he met his silent partner in that lonely corner room” – the singer-songwriter doesn’t spell out his protagonist for his audience, but sketches abstractly with no specific description. Each listener will come away with a different interpretation from the next, but many have been brought to believe that the artist is painting his native land of Florida, and the petty crimes committed to make ends meet.
He sheds light on the underworld he grew up around, and develops a film noir-style story in just three verses and a chorus. In the book Conversations With Tom Petty, he explained the obstacles to his writing to author Paul Zollo: “And the trouble with [story songs] is you don’t have a lot of space to get it in. So you’ve got to be lucky enough to get the lyric where it hits, and it has a pretty wide scope, where maybe one line can create multiple images in a person’s head. And that way, you can kind of squeeze a movie into three minutes.”
The artist kept it simple and personified a stereotype in a short biography that could be applicable to any local spinster, ensuring that most listeners would have at least a distant image in mind. His indistinct sketch leaves room for relatability, for anyone to see themselves in the man “working on something big”. The repeated lyric is believed to emphasise the pressure on artists in the music business, or on any entrepreneur working towards the American myth of self-made success.
The song’s almost aspirational melody brings a comforting country feel, and keeps listeners on a tight rope between apathy and optimism. On the other hand, the guitar riffs and slow rhythm could easily be the soundtrack of a lonely bar in the desert where a petty thief could be pictured having a dusty drink with his getaway driver.
The listless track has many elements of a lost, disconnected generation, that go beyond low-lives: “And he was not looking for romance, just someone he could trust” looks at the blind need for connection, a distraction from loneliness, regardless of who comes with it. The anonymity of the “silent partner” depicts this craving for companionship from the outset, with little regard for what they would have to say.
Petty developed his characters subtly and killed them while still bringing them to life. His story comes to life in death, when the body of “just another clown” is found in a sad, anonymous hotel room, atop a “still-made bed”. The song has invited compassion and contemplation, and brought Petty a spot on the wall among Johnny Cash and Billie Joel for the few successful story songs ever written.
