“Always be partial to”: Tom Petty on the album that meant the most to him
For an artist who’s been in the game a long time, there comes a point where it becomes impossible to gauge every single one of their albums against themselves. It’s one thing if they pour over their work for years before committing it to tape, but once things start stacking up, people start associating their albums with their memories of recording it rather than whether every one of the songs holds up. Then again, Tom Petty did admit that he had a certain soft spot for what he did on Hard Promises.
Looking at where Petty had been, though, his true time in the sun should have been Damn the Torpedoes. The entire album sent him on a fast track to being one of the biggest names in music, and having songs being played on the radio every single day was probably pretty good payback for having industry suits breathing down his neck about the ownership of his material.
At the same time, that kind of whirlwind can take it out of someone, and Hard Promises feels like the first time in a while that Petty was able to breathe. Whereas most albums like this would try to build off the momentum of what he had previously done, it was far more important for him to address the problems that he had rather than do the most predictable and make a single called ‘Refugees’.
There are still great songs to be found here, like ‘The Waiting’ and ‘Insider’, but there’s more than a little bit of melancholy sprinkled throughout the record. Tracks like ‘The Criminal Kind’ saw him dabbling in that outlaw country mould that he loved so much, and ‘Something Big’ had to have been the darkest that he had ever taken his music with a Southern gothic story about men on the wrong side of the law.
Even when he had his publishing back, his headaches weren’t over when his label tried to jack up the prices of his albums to get a little more dough at the end of the day. Despite going through the kind of problems that would make any average rocker want to leave the industry altogether, Petty still thought that Hard Promises summed up the Heartbreakers better at that point than any other record.
Despite moving on from it by the time of Long After Dark, Petty still felt that there was a certain sheen on Hard Promises that would never go away, saying, “I think I’ll always be a little partial towards Hard Promises. It’s really the one that meant the most, at the time and now. I got most of the ballads out of my system with that, and it was, you know, well-liked by a lot of people.”
And for everyone getting antsy about going into an album with many ballads, that doesn’t mean it’s strictly downtempo. ‘A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)’ and ‘Kings Road’ are among his finest rockers, and when it does settle down, ‘Insider’ is pure heartache and ‘You Can Still Change Your Mind’ is what happens when Petty and Mike Campbell try to recreate Brian Wilson-style symphonies.
The end result of Hard Promises didn’t set itself up to be a happy record, but it is by far the moodiest record of Petty’s golden age. Others might have better singles, but none of them can capture the vibe that this one has.
