The Tom Petty album he was never proud of: “I was completely off my game”
Tom Petty would never put out something that didn’t at least come up to his own level of standards. After becoming one of the biggest names in music in the 1970s, his intuition for writing songs from the heart never really failed him, leading to him becoming an honourary godfather of alternative music when the 1990s rolled around, becoming friends with everyone from Dave Grohl to members of Pearl Jam. Petty can admit his faults, though, and when he was approached to soundtrack She’s The One, he began to crack under pressure.
When looking at where his career had just been, you’d think that Petty had absolutely nothing to worry about. He had come off of making one of his masterpieces in Wildflowers, and he managed to pull off the unenviable task of having to play a convincing second fiddle to Johnny Cash on the album Unchained. All signs pointed to a little pet project being fine…as long as you didn’t know his story.
Because if you look at the background of Wildflowers, Petty was about to enter one of the biggest lows of his career. His wife was separating from him, and as he decided to take on the soundtrack, he figured the songs would just write themselves when it came time for him to put everything together.
Whereas most records have a certain deadline of months at a time, Petty was under the assumption that he would make a few calls to bring together a soundtrack of the best heartland rockers of his generation. The studio had other plans, though, and was convinced that he would put together his own version of what Paul Simon did with The Graduate soundtrack.
Petty isn’t the kind of person who writes to order, though. There are a few times when his music comes to him without thinking about it, but asking him to come up with a few great songs within the span of a few months is like asking Picasso to paint you a picture with only a few weeks’ notice.
For Petty, this kind of demand was torture to work through, later recalling in Petty: The Biography, “I felt terrible…[My manager] talked me into it. I blame him. I shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t have done this on my own. After that, it was a matter of having a deadline, hurriedly doing some overdubs and mixing. I was completely off my game”.
Even if the record felt like a massive overhaul for Petty, he did feature some great songs on the final record. ‘Walls’ is a brilliant opener that captures everything the band was about, and even the leftovers from Wildflowers like ‘California’ and ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ are absolutely stellar from back to front.
It’s not like you don’t feel the slapdash way of working, though, considering ‘Walls’ and ‘Angel Dream’ are on the track listing two separate times. Petty also didn’t always create new songs for the record, eventually throwing in some covers of songs like Beck’s ‘Asshole’ to fill out the rest of it.
Still, that doesn’t deter from the songs being an essential part of Petty’s catalogue, finding that slow middle ground between Wildflowers and what was to come on the album Echo. There are the makings of a good Tom Petty album in here, and since the re-release has completely restricted the track listing, perhaps that was closer to what Petty heard in his head.
