The best song Jeff Lynne wrote with Tom Petty: “Brilliant”
By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Lynne seemed to have a magic touch on every single record he touched.
He was already one of the greatest musical masterminds of the 1970s after working with ELO, but after putting his band on ice for a little while, getting the chance to work with some of the greatest rock stars in the world with The Traveling Wilburys was like a match made in heaven whenever they broke out the acoustic guitars. Lynne was more than happy to live out his dreams every time he walked into the studio, but there was something about working with Tom Petty that seemed to be almost too perfect.
Granted, it’s not like The Wilburys didn’t break the ice for both of them in many respects. Petty was already considered the new kid in the band, being one of the youngest members to join, but Lynne was already in the same league as Petty in many respects. Both of them were indebted to the classics whenever they made some of their new songs, so the idea of them working together after The Wilburys felt like a no-brainer.
Petty had already loved what Lynne could do with chords on songs like ‘Do Ya’, and he had even tried to rip him off on more than a few occasions, so getting him in the studio for Full Moon Fever was like having the creative partner he never had. This was going to be the first official solo Petty record, and while the rest of the Heartbreakers might not have been as happy about that once they were sidelined, the songs spoke for themselves.
‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ and ‘Free Fallin’ are still some of the greatest songs that Petty ever wrote, so Lynne working on the next record with the Heartbreakers sounded like a match made in heaven, in theory. When everyone got to the studio, though, the Heartbreakers didn’t mince words about everything feeling stilted. Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch never really found their place working on the album, but Lynne understood what he was going for when working on those tunes.
He was a stickler for melody, and Petty was more than willing to push himself to get the right sound out of whatever tune he had. ‘All the Wrong Reasons’ is like the new and improved version of ‘Free Fallin’, and the band’s rockers definitely kicked up a notch on tunes like ‘Out in the Cold’ and ‘Makin’ Some Noise’, but ‘Learning to Fly’ was the kind of song that was almost too perfect for Lynne to touch.
There’s not a lot going on with only four chords and Petty’s melody, but Lynne admitted that the arrangement was the perfect example of what they did together, saying, “One of my favorite songs would be ‘Learning To Fly’ that we co-wrote. It’s such a complete, the sound of it, then the words are brilliant. Tom wrote all the words except for a few little words that I had here and there… a couple of little… ‘and’ and ‘the’ and ‘but’ there was, I think.” And considering this was the one song the Heartbreakers loved, that’s really saying a lot compared to the rest of the album.
Petty was never one to shy away from the harsh topics in the world, and while the song isn’t exactly a protest tune by any stretch, you can hear his feelings about the realities going on with the threat of Cold War missiles. But the beauty of all his songs were about keeping things wide open, and anyone who has ever felt like they have flown too close to the sun can see a bit of themselves in the line about how difficult it is to come down off of a high.
All Lynne needed to do was be the funnel for Petty’s genius a lot of the time, but it’s not like his arrangement didn’t have its own charm to it. Those background harmonies make the whole song feel like it’s floating for those four glorious minutes, and even if Petty never made another album afterwards, a song like this would still be considered one of the finest tunes that he ever wrote.
