The 1999 album Tom Petty regretted but always defended: “I had shut down”
Tom Petty never needed to beat around the bush when it came to the kind of music he made.
Either you liked him or you didn’t, and he usually didn’t really care about what the critics had to say whenever he came out with something new. As long as he liked it, that was all that mattered, but there were more than a few times when he could see the difference between one of his masterpieces and albums that turned him into his own worst critic whenever he looked back on them.
After all, nothing that The Heartbreakers have done has been perfect front to back, and there are more than a few times where Petty admitted that some of their tunes didn’t exactly work right. He knew that there were moments where they were spinning their wheels, and more often than not, you can see the transitional albums as clear as day when you look back on what they were trying to do.
They were biding time at the beginning of their career before they landed on Damn the Torpedoes, and even when Petty was on the cusp of creating what made Full Moon Fever, he was already having some issues when working on Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). But those records never got the kind of respect that some of the more intimate Petty albums got later on in his career.
He was showing the world a different side of himself when he went solo, and even when the band got integrated into everything, Wildflowers became the kind of record that virtually anyone could have fallen in love with. Petty was talking about the real issues that he was dealing with at the time, but since he was about to go through a lengthy divorce directly after the record was finished, Echo was the moment where everything suddenly crashed for him.
Aside from having to deal with untangling himself from the love of his life, the real hard part of the album for him was knowing that he was only halfway there. A lot of the songs on the record were made up on the fly, and Petty was using a lot of tunes as an excuse to just let out some of his feelings, whether that was him laying everything out on the table on ‘Echo’ or sounding like he’s actually on the verge of getting too emotional in the chorus of a song like ‘Lonesome Sundown’.
And while Petty didn’t want anything to do with the record and even refused to listen to it for years, he remembered having a bit of a change of heart when his wife Dana encouraged him to back it later, saying, “I didn’t play it for many years, and then we were driving into town one day, and it came on in the car, because Dana had been playing it, and I started to turn it off, and she said, ‘No, listen to this’. And I did. I listened to it, and I really enjoyed it. It was so much fun, because I had no idea what was coming next. It was one of those records during which I had shut down so much that I didn’t even remember some of the songs.”
There aren’t that many bright spots on the record as there are on other Petty records; you can definitely hear him starting to try out new things as well. ‘Room at the Top’ is one of the most openhearted songs he ever made, and even though it’s heartbreaking to know that his love wasn’t reciprocated, he did seem to have the same fire that he had when he was a kid when making the record.
Compared to most of his other records, this is the one Tom Petty album where Tom Petty wasn’t driving the car, but that doesn’t mean that the trip isn’t well worth going on or anything. A lot of the best moments on the record are when he does choose to open up, and there are some fascinating glimpses into his psyche for those who are willing to look for them throughout the record.
