The band “at the forefront” of all modern music, according to Tom Petty
The hardest challenge for any recording artist is trying to keep up with the times. It’s one thing to have your sound down to a science, but what happens when the trends change and suddenly the sound that everybody loves sounds like the most dated thing in the world? Where most artists sink or swim along with the time, Tom Petty could still respect the new school, and he knew something different was going on when he heard Radiohead perform.
When approaching any of his own songs, though, Petty came at it from the most basic rock and roll angle. Some of his tunes aren’t the hardest thing in the world, but if they pass the test of being able to work on just an acoustic guitar and still resonate, it’s hardly going to matter to the rest of the audience listening in.
But Radiohead were never that kind of act. Sure, there may have been a few songs that could translate pretty well on just an acoustic guitar, but ever since Ok Computer, the group managed to create textures with their music about setting up a mood in the listener’s mind rather than telling a straightforward story.
Just take what they did on Kid A, for instance. All of the lyrics on the album were assembled piecemeal from different fragments that the group had put together. That practice alone sounds like a dreadful way of writing, but since the whole album is about tapping into that synthetic side of music, it actually sounds like some warped AI spouting out technical jargon and morbid warnings about the future.
That kind of sound couldn’t have been further away from Petty’s music, but he could still respect Radiohead’s status as one of the finest groups working, telling Warren Zanes, “In my view, Radiohead is the group that is at the forefront of trying to find some new ground. There are a lot of people out there who say they are, and there are a lot of people musically masturbating, but I think Radiohead can do it and make it come through as real music. I admire them so much.”
Then again, it’s not like Petty wasn’t prone to having a few wild sounds crop up on his records. The kind of massive chaos going on in ‘The National Anthem’ might just sound like noise, but the atmosphere of throwing everything at the wall in the studio couldn’t have been all that different from when Petty was mixing together electric sitars and drum machines on ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’.
And it’s not like Radiohead couldn’t break their songs down on Petty’s level, either. As much as their later period was focused around the artificial side of writing, a tune like ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ or even ‘Present Tense’ off A Moon Shaped Pool were there to remind everyone that they were still an amazing musical collective before anything else.
Petty didn’t stop there, either, also shouting out more contemporary artists that he thought were carrying on rock music like Cage the Elephant or even covering songs by Beck in his solo career. Many musicians of Petty’s era stopped caring about modern artists, but until his final hours, the heartland rocker never shut off his ears to the new school of musicians.
