“No place to go”: The album that changed the way Tom Petty wrote songs
Every single artist is going to want to have a specific challenge for themselves whenever they make a new record. None of their fans are asking them to reinvent the wheel by any stretch, but there’s always going to be that urge to do something that will mess with the fanbase a little bit and make them question the kind of artist they’ve been listening to all this time. And while Tom Petty was more than happy to play rock and roll to anyone within earshot, there were also subtle ways he could change his recording process.
When he first started writing tunes with the Heartbreakers, though, it was trial by fire every time he went into the studio. Since he had to learn the ropes on the job most of the time, there were times when their original procer Denny Cordell would take Petty aside and tell him to come back to the studio equipped with as many songs as possible, even if not all of them were meant to be the greatest thing that he ever made.
But once the band started working on records after Damn the Torpedoes, they started thinking more about how some of their songs could be structured. They fought tooth and nail to get the right live take for a song like ‘Refugee’, but sometimes it was better to create certain textures by overdubbing parts or layering sounds on top of each other to create the perfect production, like on ‘You Can Still Change Your Mind’.
That approach wouldn’t be fully explored until records like Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers, but Southern Accents did represent a nice middle ground. Although the album never reached its full potential since everyone was high off their asses on cocaine half the time, tunes like ‘Mary’s New Car’ and ‘Rebels’ were great snapshots at what Petty viewed as life living in the American south as a kid.
While not every song on the record was meant to stand the test of time, it got Petty to start thinking about the idea of conceptual writing. He often dug deep into himself to find the right feel for many of his songs, but it was easier for him to create works of fiction whenever singing ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’.
“One of the things that happened with the Southern Accents album is that I started writing about specific characters, rather than just from my own experience.”
Tom Petty
Even when discussing his later hit ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’, Petty credited Southern Accents for opening his mind to what could happen with a new kind of writing style, saying, “One of the things that happened with the Southern Accents album is that I started writing about specific characters, rather than just from my own experience, and this was a song in that style. This guy had no place to go, and he’s just trying to find a place to fit in.”
And by the time Wildflowers was over, that kind of character-driven writing could have been his safety blanket. Echo was a look into the darkest chapters of his life, so instead of having to go through every facet of his divorce, it was easy to talk about characters that vaguely resembled what he was going through on songs like ‘Room at the Top’ and ‘Free Girl Now’.
But for an artist who has been in the game as long as Petty was, learning to separate himself from his art was almost necessary. The biggest artists of their time don’t even seem human in many respects, so being able to inhabit a different person when stepping behind the microphone is a way for most people to leave their performance self on the stage.
