The song Tom Petty thought was massively underrated: “It used to drive me nuts”
Not every song is necessarily meant to do as well as the artist thinks it should. There are often that handful of tracks that a group would consider a cut above the rest, but the masses usually have other plans for what they think is the best in one’s catalogue. Although Tom Petty made a habit of being in the good graces of the pop world, he felt that ‘Angel Dream’ never got the credit it deserved as one of his greatest tunes.
It’s not like it was released at the optimal time, either. When working on the soundtrack to the movie She’s the One, half of what Petty cobbled together was either odds and ends that he hadn’t quite finished up or the diamonds he made when working on Wildflowers that were left on the cutting room floor.
Though the soundtrack album is a bit of a mixed bag in some spots, it does make for some of the most underrated cuts in his discography. Working with Johnny Cash gave him the basis for the heartland rock diamond ‘Walls’, and it makes no musical sense that a song with both Ringo Starr and Carl Wilson on it like ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ got completely discarded by the public.
When looking through the album, ‘Angel Dream’ is one of the few outliers on the record. Most of the record had been written and demoed beforehand, but this was a new song that was about as gentle as Petty would ever get in his career, singing about someone who would be able to save him from counting himself out.
And, yeah, Petty definitely pulls from a real experience here. Half of Wildflowers set up the calm before the storm that came with his divorce, but ‘Angel Dream’ was about the moment that he found his second wife, Dana, and being thankful to have someone by his side to help him through his emotional turmoil.
Petty may have bled on this track, but he wasn’t all that thrilled that it never registered with the public, telling Billboard, “In the last days of FM just before it just died, it used to drive me nuts; if there wasn’t a guitar solo, they didn’t want it. So something like ‘Angel Dream’, which has got to be one of my ten best songs ever, was completely overlooked. But, you know, this is life in the big city; what can you do?”
Then again, Petty found an answer to that question when he got into the studio to work on The Last DJ. As much as it could have come off as the grumblings of an old man about the state of music these days, the heartland rocker was just looking to remind everyone about the integrity that people still need to make good music, even if it means going against what a board room of executives thinks is the approved version of what a hit should be.
Regardless of how many people have a hard time choosing singles, Petty knew a great song when he heard one, and disregarding something just because it didn’t have what the marketing department wanted didn’t make any sense. After all, this was about hearing an artist’s perspective on life, and if anyone bothered to listen, maybe something like ‘Angel Dream’ wouldn’t fall by the wayside.
