‘Full Moon Fever’: the Tom Petty album that benefitted entirely from timing
If someone claims they can always spot a hit, they’re almost certainly deluding themselves. While it’s easy to identify a well-crafted or commercially oriented song, predicting whether it will resonate with listeners is mostly down to chance. The music landscape is littered with baffling successes—just look at some of Drake’s recent hits—and equally baffling misses. Even the best artists have faced the frustration of their record label failing to see the potential in a track. Few artists embody that resilience and talent more than Tom Petty.
Let’s be real here: you probably can’t have a “make or break” album when you’re one of the biggest and most respected artists on the planet, but Full Moon Fever sure did feel that way for the ‘American Girl’ hitmaker. Coming the year after dropping his first album with the Travelling Wilbury’s and keeping his buddy Otis Wilbury on as producer (Jeff Lynne to his mother), this was the first record he was making as a full-on solo artist, without the aid of his previously ever-present Heartbreakers.
One could have easily suspected his time in the supergroup rubbed off on him. It can’t be a coincidence, right? You hobnob with the actual Bob Dylan and the actual George Harrison long enough, and anyone would want to see how they’d match up. Coincidence or not, however, Petty went into the studio with Lynne with the intention of making as big an album as he possibly could. Glossy, clean pop songs minus the grit The Heartbreakers were known for. Kind of, every member of the band save for drummer Stan Lynch contributed to the album.
The record they came away with had Petty, Lynch and basically everyone who heard it who wasn’t a Heartbreaker doing cartwheels. This wasn’t going to be successful. With some of the songs on this record, it was going to be massive. So, the gang brought it to their label, expecting to play the album precisely once before releasing it the day of the meeting, and then doing lines off the platinum records by the end of the week, and then the weirdest thing happened.
MCA, under Irving Azoff, point blank refused to put the record out, reasoning that the album “had no hits on it”. Deflated, the group retreated back to Mike Campbell’s studio and asked themselves the million-dollar question. If none of the songs they had already would be hits, then what in Christ’s name would be hits?!
Considering the record was a deliberate throwback to Petty’s musical roots and key influences, they decided to add an admittedly gorgeous cover of The Byrds’ ‘I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better’ and return to MCA in six months.
During an interview with Songfacts, Campbell himself detailed what happened next. “In the interim, they changed A&R departments, and a whole new group of people were in there. We brought the same record back like six months later, and they loved it – they said, ‘Oh, there’s three hits on here.’”
Those three hits in question? Only ‘I Won’t Back Down’, ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ and ‘Free Fallin’’.
Just three of the most iconic, best songs in Petty’s entire back catalogue that the previous A&R department had heard and thought, “Nah, what else ya got?” It’s true; no one can really know when you’ve got a hit in the commercial sense of the word. You can always know when you’ve got a great song on your hands, and sometimes, that’s all that counts.
