The 1981 song that left Tom Petty feeling scammed: “It pissed me off”
Many artists don’t understand what they have on their hands until their songs are released. It can take a lot of hindsight for people to see a song for what it is, and even if it sounds like it’s not coming together in the studio, that tune could mean the world to someone else on the other side.
Although Tom Petty usually had good quality control over the kind of music that he wanted to release, he remembered feeling a little bit blindsided watching this song slip through his fingers.
For a songwriter like Petty, that tension between instinct and outcome was always part of the process. He trusted his ear, but even the most seasoned musicians can’t always predict how a song will land once it leaves the studio and takes on a life of its own.
Moments like this underline how collaborative and unpredictable the music industry can be. A track that doesn’t quite fit one artist’s vision can become a defining hit in someone else’s hands, reshaping not only its commercial trajectory but also how it’s remembered in the wider cultural landscape.
Before he even released his first album, though, Petty had become used to saving the best music he had for his mainline studio records. He always tried to be a working songwriter who kept up the craft as much as he could, but it wasn’t until something jumped out at him that he got the desire to put it down on record.
And after Damn the Torpedoes, you couldn’t say that he didn’t know how to make the right call. Judging by the massive lawsuit he had to deal with from his record label, you couldn’t pick a better album for a victory lap, especially when tunes like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’ stormed into the charts.
That kind of triumph can be fun, but that means that the fall is all the more bittersweet. While it would be inaccurate to call Hard Promises a “failure”, there is a definite comedown present from the last album, with Petty singing about darker subjects and the song ‘The Waiting’ being one of the few major whiffs people would get of that Torpedoes energy.
In fact, one of the songs left on the cutting room floor was a lot more bluesy than Petty thought the group could pull off. They had grown into the traditional heartland rock sound they were known for, and having a tune like ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ didn’t exactly fit their style. That is, until Stevie Nicks got ahold of it.
While Petty was more than happy to take credit for writing Nicks’s massive smash, he always felt slightly cheated, saying, “[I felt] duped. [Producer Jimmy Iovine] plays me ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,’ the same track, with her singing. I go: ‘Jimmy, you just took the song . . .’ His comeback was like: ‘This is gonna buy you a house.’ But it pissed me off because it came out at the same time as our single [‘A Woman in Love’], and I think ours suffered.”
Granted, it’s no real competition looking at how both singles worked out on the charts. Although the idea of having both a Petty song and a Nicks song featuring the Heartbreakers was already a tough gamble, the moody sound of Petty’s song was in for an uphill battle on the charts even if it didn’t have Nicks’s signature croon to compete with.
Still, having two chances at a smash hit is rarely a bad thing. Petty might not have been in love with the idea of inadvertently killing his own single, but it was worth it to give the world a glimpse at what the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman looked like outside the confines of Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood.
