The era of music Tom Petty called too “pompous” and “pretentious”
For most musicians, creativity is about having a purpose. For Tom Petty, it was always a means to feel meaningful and throw himself into something that felt bigger than he. “If I don’t have a project going, I don’t feel like I’m connected to anything,” he once said.
He also compared the whole thing to the lonely act of fishing, saying that songwriting felt a lot like “keeping your pole in water” unil “I got a bite”.
“There’s either a fish in the boat or there’s not,” he explained to the LA Times. “Sometimes you come home and you didn’t catch anything and sometimes you caught a huge fish. But that was the work part of it to me.”
This also meant that, to Petty, being authentic often meant locking himself away until it felt like he was onto something, scathing away, sculpting perfect words without much outsider influence. It might have been a lonely craft most of the time, but one that meant Petty remained on top of his game, soaring above most of his contemporaries with stories that felt uniquely his own, not at all tampered with by the pressure of pleasing perfect strangers.
And that, above all else, is a musician’s greatest challenge. When all others seem to be heading down a one-way road, jumping on trends and maintaining relevance by adopting familiar tropes and executing stories they know’ll do well, Petty set up camp in a different lane, writing and exploring his own mind and knowing that anything else would have fallen at the first hurdle. But it’s not just something anybody can do; it’s something only innovators carving their own path, like Petty, can manage.
That said, Petty knew how to execute individualism without coming across as someone who was too preoccupied with living on the straight and narrow. In his eyes, there was “nothing worse” than a “serious pop singer”, a likely playful jab at some of his greatest industry friends and collaborators like Jeff Lynne and George Harrison (apparently they were both at the table when he made this statement and erupted into knowing laughter at the self-awareness).
But this opinion also extended into Petty’s views on the music scene (emerging from an interview in 1990) and how so-called “serious” pop stars can often get caught up in the nitty gritty of appearing a certain way, or having specific things to say, that it all becomes unnecessarily convoluted and not at all conducive to someone who actually is authentic or has something meaningful to contribute to music in a broader sense.
“You can still say things while you’re lightening up,” Petty told Reading Eagle. “But I think we’re all weary of people who come on for an entire LP and give you the impression that this person is trying to tell you real serious things that they couldn’t possibly have an impact on.” His two cents is that the music of the ’90s was transparent in this respect, because too often it comes across as dishonest.
“A lot of the lyrics that I hear on the radio these days sound pompous,” he said. “I’m not against people being serious with their work, I just think they have to be careful that it doesn’t come off as pretentious.”
A lot of this also comes down to how Petty perceives purpose through music (something he always aspired to build around). A man might feel against the world on a lonely fishing trip, but if he’s hard at work, it’s a means to feel connected in a way that also feels authentic enough to be just the right amount of serious. Not too bogged down in the weeds of doing something special that it becomes “pretentious”.
