The one singer Bruce Springsteen was heartbroken to lose: “A long lost brother”
Being a songwriter wasn’t really a choice that Bruce Springsteen got to make on his own.
Sometimes the greatest writers of all time feel like they have a higher calling to talk about the world around them, and a lot of what ‘The Boss’ was used to was creating the kinds of stories that he could see happening every single day when he was growing up in New Jersey. Not all of it was pretty, but he was at least happy to consider himself one link in the chain of fantastic storytellers in rock and roll history.
That chain may have officially started with people like Chuck Berry showing him what a rock and roll song could be, but Bob Dylan was the one who burst everything wide open for him. Springsteen knew that Dylan was speaking to people like him when he heard his first songs, and while the folk angle took some getting used to, there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t completely dumbfounded when they heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ for the first time.
Springsteen wanted to make tunes that made people feel like that, but he wasn’t the only one looking to paint a picture of America. He was giving his audience a look at the kind of tales that went on in Jersey, but there were just as many people out there who were trying to tell their stories as well. Heartland rock didn’t yet have a name, but you could hear a lot of the elements start to congeal once Born to Run came out.
No one knew what they were listening to just yet, but when Springsteen came out around the same time that people like Bob Seger and John Mellencamp started having their first hits, people got a better idea of what was happening. These were artists looking to make music from the heart, but there weren’t many people who could capture the romanticism of rock and roll quite as Tom Petty could.
While Petty and Springsteen grew up around the same time, the blonde-haired giant led the Heartbreakers through songs that had a bit more reverence for their roots. Springsteen wasn’t afraid to criticise the more corrupt aspects of society here and there in his music, but whenever you turned on one of Petty’s records, everything felt right with the world. He could write a feel-good rocker like ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ and then be breaking your heart with tunes like ‘Southern Accents’, so when that voice was silenced, Springsteen took it a lot harder than he thought.
He had never been known for playing with Petty by any stretch, but without those songs being out there in the world anymore, Springsteen felt like a piece of the sky was missing, saying, “Down here on E Street, [I’m] devastated and heartbroken over the death of Tom Petty. I’ve always felt a deep kinship with his music. A great songwriter and performer, whenever we saw each other it was like running into a long lost brother. Our world will be a sadder place without him.”
And part of the reason why that heartbreak hurts so much is because of how open Petty was in his lyrics. He was never afraid of getting sentimental, and whether he was going through a major separation on Wildflowers or dealing with the ongoing problems with the music industry on The Last DJ, you could feel that can-do attitude coming out of every note he played the same way that Springsteen did when he was working on records like The Rising.
But the real magic behind Petty’s music was how well it captured the simple aspects of life. Not everyone was going to understand what it was like to work on orange groves as he talked about in one of his best songs, but the simplicity of his lyrics made you feel like you were seeing a musical painting come to life right before your eyes.
