Looking back at Taylor Swift’s cover of ‘American Girl’ by Tom Petty
Taylor Swift’s career has taken her to unfathomable heights, and currently, there’s no bigger artist on the planet. She climbed to the top with an acoustic guitar as a teenager and stayed perched there for over a decade, which is a remarkable achievement by anybody’s standards.
While Taylor has unfairly had plentiful critics throughout her career solely because she makes pop music, she’s an authentic songwriter who grew up admiring Tom Petty. Growing up, he was the reason she felt inspired to pick up a pen and begin writing her own material.
When Petty passed away in 2017, Swift was devastated and shared a poignant tribute to the late singer-songwriter about his work’s impact on her. Although by this point, Taylor had already established herself as a record-breaking artist, who was selling-out stadiums across the world, she hadn’t forgotten her roots.
“To me, Tom Petty represented a kind of songwriting I idolised: complex simplicity,” she said to Rolling Stone. “It said so much in the lyrics, the concepts, the stories, the message, the nuances … but always brought you back to a hook that got stuck in everyone’s head. He motivated thousands of guitarists to learn to play just because they wanted to be able to play ‘Free Fallin’. Count me as one of them.”
Unfortunately, no footage exists of Swift playing ‘Free Fallin’ while practising her trade. However, in 2009, she officially released a cover of ‘American Girl’, another one of Petty’s signature tracks, which appeared on Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in 1976.
According to SongFacts, Tom Petty said of this song: “I wrote that in a little apartment I had in Encino. It was right next to the freeway, and the cars sometimes sounded like waves from the ocean, which is why there’s the line about the waves crashing on the beach. The words just came tumbling out very quickly — and it was the start of writing about people who are longing for something else in life, something better than they have.”
There’s a lot of mystery which shrouds ‘American Girl’. After years of false speculation, Petty was forced to deny the song was about a college student who committed suicide by jumping from the Beaty Towers residence hall at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.
In the book, Conversations With Tom Petty, he explains, “It’s become a huge urban myth down in Florida. That’s just not at all true. The song has nothing to do with that. But that story really gets around… They’ve really got the whole story. I’ve even seen magazine articles about that story. ‘Is it true, or isn’t it true?’ They could have just called me and found out it wasn’t true.”
Listen below to Taylor Swift’s take on the Americana classic, ‘American Girl’.
