The one album Tom Petty dismissed as “terrible”
Having a back catalogue that is entirely perfect without any regrettable bumps in the road is a near-impossible task for any artist with a career spanning decades, such as Tom Petty.
Even groundbreaking artists like David Bowie and Bob Dylan both suffered difficult spells, which led to them being written off by a legion of their own fans. Most acts only enjoy a brief spell at the top, and only a select number from history have stayed there without the odd moment that later made them wince.
These barren creative periods are also a reminder that these artists we all admire are human after all. It’s easy to forget that they have personal lives and things going on behind the scenes, which can dilute the quality of their creative output, as was the case with Petty.
In the mid-1990s, Petty, from the outside looking in, was riding the crest of a wave. He’d struck gold with his solo album Wildflowers in 1994. However, he couldn’t keep the good times rolling when he reunited with The Heartbreakers two years later. The creation of Wildflowers was a straightforward but painful exercise as he dealt with the breakdown of his marriage, yet for his next project, Petty had run out of creative juices.
Following his divorce, Petty, as he later discussed, briefly struggled with heroin addiction. As a result, his attention was firmly diverted from making music. Naturally, as he spent his days staring into the dark abyss of addiction, his head wasn’t invested in his career. He then made questionable decisions that he’d likely not have undertaken if he were in the optimal state of mind.
The main error he made was agreeing to make a film soundtrack. While these have the potential to become iconic, the movie has to be right. Importantly, for it to become a successful endeavour, the musical act must wholly believe in the movie and create a body of work reflecting the director’s vision, like Idles recently did with Daron Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing. On the other hand, if they treat it as a Hollywood payday, it can be a recipe for disaster.
The offer that Petty accepted wasn’t for a thrilling drama that could be in Oscars contention. Instead, he signed on to create the soundtrack for the fluffy Ed Burns rom-com She’s The One, starring Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston. Money wasn’t even his main reason for agreeing to the project; he’d become friends with the director and was persuaded to take the job.
It was a decision he later regretted. No coherent narrative runs through the soundtrack, with Petty treating the album with the same level of attention as overdue homework. For the album, he used a selection of songs that he previously deemed not good enough for Wildflowers, a selection of new tracks he had lying around in his vault and a handful of covers.
Although the opportunity to record the soundtrack provided Petty with an excuse to reunite with The Heartbreakers, there was little else to rave about from the forgettable release.
During a conversation with Men’s Journal, Petty revealed: “Never listened to it. I hated that record – the whole idea of it offended me. I only did it because I didn’t have anything else to do. I was single and living on my own, and this idea came up, and I liked Ed and thought he was pretty sharp, so I wrote him a couple of songs.”
He continued: “And then it just kept mushrooming into, ‘Do the whole thing.’ So I took some stuff I hadn’t used in Wildflowers, really crummy versions, badly mixed, and put them on there. It was terrible, really. I’m disappointed I did that.”
The fact that he never listened to the soundtrack for She’s The One shows the lack of consideration he had for the project. While it likely paid lucratively for the relative level of work it consumed to produce, unsurprisingly, directors weren’t queuing up around the block to recruit him to make a soundtrack for their movie, and he never stepped back foot in the arena. Thankfully, the sorry saga was nothing more than a blip with The Heartbreakers regaining form on 1999’s Echo.
