The 1996 album Tom Petty never cared about: “I was just not happy”
There are hardly any people who seemed to live and breathe rock and roll the same way Tom Petty could.
He was never meant to be one of the biggest names in the genre by any stretch, but the reason why people loved having him around was because of how much he seemed to genuinely enjoy making songs. He was never into the glitz and the glamour of fame, but there were more than a few times when he could admit that he wasn’t exactly ready to make a record when he walked into the studio.
Petty didn’t like the idea of spinning his wheels all that often, and when you look at the best work of his career, it normally comes from when he’s making something outside of his comfort zone. No one was asking for an album like Southern Accents, but it’s easier to appreciate him taking a swing and not getting the most out of it than having to worry about whatever the back half of Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) turned into.
But no other album seemed to show the dark side of Petty quite like Echo. He was going through a messy divorce at the time of Wildflowers, and since this was the first album where he could truly process his feelings, fans got to see the version of Petty that doesn’t come along all that often. He was heartbroken, but if you look at his studio chronology, a lot of the problems that were happening with him actually turned up one album before.
And no, it’s not Wildflowers. There are certainly hints on that album that Petty was in for a pretty dramatic swerve in his personal life, but putting together the soundtrack for She’s the One was the real difficult part. Petty had never done a soundtrack to begin with, and while he was more than happy to get back in the studio and find some sense of peace playing his music, it’s not always easy trying to find the best ideas for songs when worrying about what was going on at home.
Which is why half of the tunes on the album are largely made up of table scraps from his last album. There are a handful of tunes that never deserved to be relegated to B-sides like ‘California’ and ‘Hung Up and Overdue’, but even when putting the final tracklist together, Petty felt that it was better for him to wash his hands of the entire project before he could really take it all in.
It was one of the first records of his in a long time that only went gold, but Petty figured that didn’t matter to him so long as he had some time away from music for a while, saying, “I was just not happy. I needed more than a hit album in my life. I needed to feel good about myself. I was in an unhappy marriage and I had to deal with that. I had to grow up in a lot of ways. If you do this all your life, you don’t have the normal experience. The rock and roll lifestyle does not encourage you to be responsible.”
At the same time, there are a few tunes on here that sound like they could have been the kickoff point to a completely different album. ‘Angel Dream’ was the light at the end of the tunnel for his grieving process, and when you look at the personnel on the record, getting artists like Ringo Starr and Carl Wilson to perform on the project wasn’t like Petty wasn’t trying whatever he could to make his songs sound great.
In fact, there’s actually a great album trapped somewhere within this original soundtrack and what turned up on Echo a few years later. Because the happier songs on the soundtrack had made their way onto Echo, perhaps Petty wouldn’t have been talking about it like it was the album that almost killed him years later.
