The one album Tom Petty couldn’t stand listening to: “The one that annoys me”
Nothing that Tom Petty ever worked on needed to be perfect from back to front.
A lot of the beauty of the Heartbreakers was capturing the performance in the room, and even if there were a few odd mistakes here and there, it was worth it to get the feeling of everyone performing together rather than trying to overdub everyone at separate times. But while Petty learned the ins and outs of making records in a lot of different ways, he felt that some of his records weren’t worth revisiting too many times after the fact.
Then again, a lot of bands would gladly wash their hands of whatever album they have been working on once they get finished. Like it or not, listening to a bunch of tunes over and over again during the mixing process is enough for someone to get tired of the sound of their own voice, and when you don’t have a good song at the heart of everything, it can make the entire performance borderline torturous whenever you have to start honing in on the finer details.
But even if Petty had a damn good album on his hands with Damn the Torpedoes, it was always going to be an issue trying to follow it up. That record was practically aces from cover to cover, and while there wasn’t any reason to think that Petty couldn’t still write great songs, Hard Promises is clearly going through a lot more darker passages after Petty spent a year trying to get it off the ground.
Despite the opening line of the record being ‘Baby don’t it feel like heaven right now,’ the entire rest of the record already has a lot of dour moments. ‘Something Big’ and ‘The Criminal Kind’ are a lot more moody than what they had done before, and even if they do have time for some more mindless fun on songs like ‘Kings Road’, Petty was more pissed off than anything when he first heard the final version of the record.
The whole album is still great, but given how many times it went through different edits, Petty thought the whole thing sounded much too flat than it should have been, saying, “A lot of stuff that we’ve done, the nicest thing is that you can go back to it and it will hold up. I would be really disappointed if I went back and felt this was crap. And I don’t have that feeling about much of it. The one that annoys me the most is Hard Promises. Because I think it’s mixed shitty. I would love to go back and mix the record.”
Some of that might have been them trying to focus on getting the songs right above everything else, but even some of the songs sound a bit too lethargic thanks to the mixing. ‘Insider’ is still intact as one of Petty’s finest ballads, but a song like ‘Letting You Go’ feels like it’s going for a much more laid-back groove but ends up sounding like it was recorded when the band didn’t really care to put much energy into the tune that particular day.
And for anyone looking to play along with the record, it does have a fair share of problems when it comes to the tuning. While making everything a little bit slower or faster in the mix might have sounded good at the time, the fact that a lot of the best songs on the record are in between keys does make it a little bit more difficult for people to go running for their guitar and finding out that they are out of tune with the record.
But when you break it down, Hard Promises is the kind of morose companion to something like Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Both of them came out after they released one of their mammoth masterpieces, and while they weren’t going to match up to it, it’s those imperfections that give them a unique character in both of their catalogues.
