The one song Tom Petty called “the most misunderstood” he wrote
No one ever needed to worry about “selling out” when it came to Tom Petty.
He was always going to do right by his fans, and he wasn’t going to be caught dead trying to take a massive payday and crank out whatever corporate schlock that everyone wanted. He had a lot more integrity than that, but that didn’t mean that everything that he made was exactly the most well-received album in his catalogue.
Then again, Petty may be one of the few artists that never really had a truly atrocious album. There are definitely ones that he prefers over others, but even if you look at the records that he personally didn’t enjoy, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is still fantastic, and despite Echo being about a very dark chapter in his life, those songs still have that sense of magic that it takes most artists years to harness all over again.
But while Petty became a superstar virtually overnight in the 1970s, the 1980s weren’t going to be nearly as kind to him. The charts may have still loved him based on every record he put out, but I’m sure that he would have rather forgotten about the sessions that were lost to cocaine and the massive recovery process he had to restore his broken hand midway through the recording of Southern Accents.
Even though that album is among the most interesting pieces of Petty’s discography, it was clear that he needed a bit of a change after working on Long After Dark. The record was far from a disaster by any means, but compared to the heights they had reached on Hard Promises and Damn the Torpedoes, it’s easy to look at the record and see the Heartbreakers spinning their wheels a little bit.
That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of great songs, either. ‘A Wasted Life’ is one of the first times that they started testing out what could be done on synthesisers, and when they do break out the crunchy electric guitars, tunes like ‘One Story Town’ and ‘A Change of Heart’ are both fantastic examples of him being a great power pop artist. He even got a hit out of the deal with ‘You Got Lucky’, but Petty would readily admit that the tune was far from the most beloved record of his career.
Although the song is great for what it is, the heartland rocker knew that everyone got certain parts of the track completely wrong, saying, “‘You Got Lucky’ is the most misunderstood song I ever wrote. That’s a very insecure person saying that! But it’s a very real emotion. I found it amusing, really, to sing that. But some people said, ‘God! The audacity!’ Insecure people say things like that to protect themselves, to protect the real pain that they know is coming later.”
And if you look at the rest of the lyrics around the chorus, it’s not like Petty didn’t paint a thorough picture. The character in the middle of this song sounds like an absolute ass that didn’t realise that maybe he was the problem in the relationship, so when he finally gets kicked to the curb, it’s only natural for him to be angry and try to convince himself that he did absolutely nothing wrong.
Not every audience member was going to listen beyond the surface level all the time, but the fact that Petty managed to fool so many people with one line is almost comical. Because let’s face it: it’s not like there aren’t more than a few people like this out in the wild today, and even if they’re wrong, they’ll try to bend every single word that they can to find some way for them to come out on top.
