The song Tom Petty considered his most famous: “It’s become synonymous with me”
Tom Petty didn’t get up every morning trying to make a hit record whenever he could.
Most people have tried their best trying to make a halfway decent tune, but the mission behind any Heartbreakers record was for Petty to make the kind of songs that came naturally. He never wanted to make something thinking about its potential on the charts, but he also knew the key to making most people’s hearts dance whenever he started singing.
Then again, a lot of his greatest songs came from him listening to the greats who have come before him. There wasn’t a day that went by that he took The Beatles and The Byrds for granted, and considering how many times he got to work with the members of the Travelling Wilburys, he at least had a decent idea of how some of the greatest songwriters of his era constructed their masterpieces. But if you knew anything, it’s that no song is written the same way, either.
After all, the first few Heartbreakers records had come together from Petty racking his brain until he found the right idea for a song. He did get read the riot act about not having enough material from time to time, but when everything came together, nothing could ever compare to how songs like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’ sounded when he first started gaining traction on the charts.
It was a hard-fought battle to get those songs on tape, but Petty had some of his greatest songs appear to him out of the blue. He had rented out a rehearsal room for only a few hours just to get ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ down on tape, and ‘Southern Accents’ was the kind of tune that fell out of him in the middle of the night, but after the Wilburys finished up, Petty’s world took a wild turn the minute that he began working with Jeff Lynne.
Lynne already knew how to make the best records that radio could ask for with ELO and his production work for Roy Orbison and George Harrison, but Petty found something more than a producer in his friend. This was someone who could finish his musical sentences in many respects, and when he was convinced to turn ‘Free Fallin’ into a song, he didn’t realise quite what he had on his hands there.
The whole thing was done to make Lynne laugh, but after laying everything down, but as time went on, Petty considered the tune to be the signature tune of his career, saying, “He came around the next day and I played it for him. And he said, ‘Man, you stayed up and finished the song. That’s incredible. It’s great.’ And so this is how these things happen. And it’s turned out to be probably the most famous song I ever wrote. And there’s not a day that goes by that somebody doesn’t hum ‘Free Fallin’ to me or I don’t hear it somewhere. It’s become synonymous with me, I guess.”
But the reason why the song works is because it’s so simple. What was only 30 minutes of Petty’s life captured the heart of what teenage life is like in many respects. Not everyone is going to know this American girl that loves Jesus, horses, and her boyfriend back home, but it’s easy to see a picture of the kind of country that Petty grew up with every single time those opening chords play.
He may have had to thank Lynne and Mike Campbell for helping him get everything on tape, but there’s no one doubting that there was a piece of Petty’s soul that he put onto that record. It’s not going to be winning awards for being musically complex, but rarely has anyone painted a picture this vivid with only 3 chords.
