The forgotten 1999 song Tom Petty called one of his greatest: “My best songs ever”
Not every song that Tom Petty came out needed to redefine what rock and roll was supposed to be.
He wasn’t afraid to sound like his influences every time he made a new record, and even when some of the biggest names in rock and roll were by his side, it wasn’t out of the question for Petty to throw a few songs onto his albums that were fairly mindless for the time. Any artist that went on for as long as he did usually had a little bit of filler in their discography, but Petty felt that some of his finest work did end up getting forgotten somewhere along the line on his less-remembered albums.
But it’s not like every one of Petty’s low lights were meant to be undiscovered gems by any stretch. Long After Dark is more than a little bit forgettable during his classic run of albums, and even after working with a legend like Bob Dylan, hearing him and his band cutting loose on Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is the kind of thing that works best for only a few songs before it starts getting too monotonous.
He may have had to go through a lot of those albums to reach Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers, but the staggering lows of the late 1990s weren’t going to be easy to get over. His messy divorce was already starting to show itself in a lot of the songs he was writing for Wildflowers, and when that wave finally hit him, you could hear him slowly trying to put himself back together throughout most of Echo.
Compared to every other Petty album, this is the one where Petty feels the most distant. He wrote all the songs, and he’s the one singing on the majority of the record, but he wasn’t looking to make hits or anything. Half of the album is more than a little bit depressing, but Petty felt that listening back to a song like ‘Billy the Kid’ made him think that the record wasn’t given the time of day like it should have.
The tune isn’t one of the band’s catchiest tunes and certainly doesn’t have their best playing, but in terms of saying what he wanted to say, Petty knew that the tune didn’t deserve to get relegated to a standard album track, saying, “I thought it was one of my best songs ever—and nobody even noticed it [laughs]. No one at the label. I kept saying, ‘There’s this song that I really think is good. I’d bet the farm on this song.’ I am disappointed.”
Then again, I’m inclined to agree with the label on this one. The song is still one of the best depictions of what Petty felt like after being knocked on his ass, but there are simply some more great songs on the album that do a better job at painting that picture. The title track was probably never going to be a single considering it’s six minutes long, but ‘Lonesome Sundown’ is one of the most raw vocal performances Petty ever gave, almost sounding like he’s on the verge of tears by the time the end of the chorus comes on.
But it’s not like the band were going to go out of their way to promote the record’s deeper cuts, either. The bigger problem going on on this album was the issues that were happening right in front of them with Howie Epstein, and even if the band were trying their best to help him straighten himself out, there was no chance that they were going to be able to make everything work and still have time to tell everyone about the deep cuts on the album that everyone ignored.
‘Billy the Kid’ is no ‘Southern Accents’ or ‘American Girl’ by any means, but when you look at the time in Petty’s life, it’s easy to understand what made him go to bat for this kind of song. He understood what he was up against when dealing with a broken heart, and his determination in this song to be knocked down and still find the strength to keep going is the best message that his fans could have hoped for from him.
