Was the girl in the Tom Petty song ‘Free Fallin’ real?
The cast of female characters depicted in Tom Petty songs have it a lot easier than many casts featured in the classic rock canon. Unlike Nick Cave, very few of them die in gruesome circumstances. Unlike Tom Waits, fewer still are lost souls circling the drains of society. Unlike the vast, vast majority of classic rock godheads, the women in his songs aren’t just faceless conquests or temptresses.
He’s not perfect, to be clear. Petty has a few examples of those tropes in his back catalogue but the vast majority of the time, there’s an empathetic, almost documentary-like quality to Petty’s character writing. These are sensitive depictions of down on their luck souls going through everyday life while dreaming of something bigger. Case in point, the two women depicted in his most beloved songs, ‘American Girl’ and ‘Free Fallin’.
‘American Girl’, in particular, has an urban legend surrounding it that should put it directly in the Cave/Waits canon. The story goes that the song is about a University of Florida student who took her own life by jumping from her dormitory window. The story lingers today despite the fact that Petty has repeatedly denied that inspired the song, principally because the actual event it’s said to be based on never happened.
In Paul Zollo’s book Conversations With Tom Petty, the Heartbreakers main man detailed what inspired the song. He said: “I was living in an apartment where I was right by the freeway. And the cars would go by… And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu. Where I heard the waves crash, but it was just the cars going by.” No death, no suffering, just a thoughtful depiction of someone dreaming of a better place.
So, who did Tom Petty write ‘Free Fallin’ about?
As a monster hit single from Petty’s commercial peak, his debut solo album Full Moon Fever, the story behind ‘Free Fallin’’ is altogether more rock ‘n’ roll. At its core, the track came from trying to make Jeff Lynne laugh. Speaking to Billboard, Petty said, “I was playing the keyboard, and I just happened to hit on that main riff, the intro of the song… I just sang that first verse. Then he starts laughing. Honestly, I thought I was just amusing Jeff.”
So, merely by clowning around in the studio, Petty stumbled upon one of the great rock choruses of the 1980s. Would that we could all get so much success from having a laugh with our mates. Then Petty finished the song, another character sketch of an everyday girl told from the perspective of her shitty boyfriend who’s “a bad boy ’cause I don’t even miss her / I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart.”
Like ‘American Girl’, there was no direct inspiration for either character. In the same Billboard interview, Petty detailed what actually inspired the track. He said, “The studio was in the valley, and I was driving from Beverly Hills to the valley and back every day. On that drive, I just used to look at Ventura Boulevard, and just life’s great pageant was going in up and down that street. And I tried to grab a little bit of these characters on the road and it was kind of how I saw it.”
That’s one of the many things that makes Petty stand out over his classic rock peers. Rather than portray the women in his songs as standard rock tropes, there’s a humanizing, novelistic quality to his characters. This depth is something that even Bruce Springsteen, with his Bob-Dylan-writing-Leader-of-the-Pack style histrionics, doesn’t reach. A depth that’s a key reason why his work still resonates so strongly today.
