The song Tom Petty said was “too light” to record
Anyone who has spent any amount of time around a musician when they’re in the process of creating has likely witnessed this weird blip. We assume that they’re always aiming for perfection. We assume all artists are looking to create that one ultimate hit, a catchy track that will grip the world and skyrocket them to fame through one gripping earworm. We assume they’re trying to make something good, but then they stumble on this odd imaginary roadblock of something being ‘too good’. No one is immune, not even Tom Petty.
It’s a weird thing to bump into. It’s definitely insecurity in some form, perhaps even an internalised sense of inferiority as if the artist doesn’t know if they’re ready to create a hit. Take Prince, for example. After he wrote ‘Purple Rain’, he seemed to go on a one-man mission to kill it, offering it out to other artists as if to get it taken off his hands, even trying to get other bands to claim he plagiarised it. The burden of writing a banger seems overwhelming, so artists all the time are found making something perfect, then messing with it in some way, scratching it up.
But it also begs the question of what makes a good song? Or, more so than that, what makes a good hit? Even on the best-selling albums in the world, there is space somewhere in that tracklist for things to get weird, or dark, or more experimental. This is more a question for radio-ready singles, and what makes a song that’s going to work for the general public.
The immediate answer would probably be something catchy, fun, and light. But even when Tom Petty made a song with all that mixed in, he was about to sabotage it, plagued by his own doubts.
It was a track that came late in the game, making the worry about it even weirder. On Highway Companion, his final solo album in 2006, there’s a track called ‘Flirting with Time’, an endlessly and effortlessly catchy track that I swear you could hear once and sing forever. But Petty nearly axed it.
“It’s almost too catchy, isn’t it?” he said to American Songwriter after the record’s release, clearly still struggling to shake the mindset off. “I played that for Jeff [Lynne], and I was kind of worried that he might say, ‘That’s too catchy. It’s too obvious’. I was worried it was too light,” he explained, and that’s the scene people know well.
Anyone who has spent any time around a musician has likely been that audience, sitting listening to a great demo with real potential and having to battle their hands away from the laptop as they try to add some strange effect to it or take out the best bit, all because they think it’s ‘too good’, ‘too easy’ or, in Petty’s case, “too light”.
But not all songs need darkness, and luckily, Petty’s peers stepped in. “Jeff and Mike liked it,” he said, and so it was retained and released as the album’s second single.
