The Tom Petty song that hurt him to sing for the first time
Sometimes, a song can be too much for its composer. Even though no one can do a track justice like the person who wrote it, there is often too much emotional baggage that goes along with a tune for it to be performed by someone night after night. Although Tom Petty may have been able to put pieces of his soul into every song he sang, one track gave him trouble singing before he had even left the studio.
Around the early 1980s, though, Petty was still riding high off the success of the album Damn the Torpedoes. Having finally conquered the battle against his record company, Petty made the music he wanted on his terms, only to be handed a mantle of pressure when trying to follow it up.
In the background, Petty also dealt with many personal grievances when he entered the studio. Aside from getting the record done, Petty had recently lost his mother and would lose one of his idols midway through recording when John Lennon passed away, etching in a message to the former Beatle in the first pressing of the album Hard Promises.
When putting together tracks for the album, producer Jimmy Iovine was also looking for songs for Stevie Nicks, who was then working on her first solo material apart from Fleetwood Mac. Needing more pieces to fill out the tracks on her album, Petty would come up with ‘Insider’, which he was mortified to show the song to Nicks.
While he wanted to write a song in Nicks’ style, Petty had grown too attached to the track, structuring a plaintive ballad that hit close to the bone for him. Despite writing with Nicks in mind, Petty eventually decided that he couldn’t give it away because of how much it hurt him not to record it himself.
When talking about it, Petty recalled how torturous it felt knowing that he wouldn’t sing the track, saying in her biography, “I remember bringing it to [Iovine], and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’ And I was really attached to it. And it really hurt me when I did the track and the vocals.”
Compared to the other ballads Petty had offered up until that point, there’s a wounded beauty at the heart of ‘Insider’. Rather than talk about a relationship gone wrong, Petty looks inward to talk about the issues that he keeps inside himself, painting a picture of a man who can never open up because he has been burned by the flames of desire one too many times.
While Petty was apologetic about taking the track back, Nicks said that she wanted to get a song with a firm backbeat behind it, leading to Petty reaching into his back catalogue to offer up the solo smash, ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’. Then again, that wouldn’t be the last time that Nicks was in the studio with Petty.
When cutting ‘Insider’ for Hard Promises, Nicks would feature prominently in the final song, contributing a harmony vocal to Petty’s and working on subsequent Heartbreakers projects like the smash single ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’. Even though Petty may have kept the song for himself, he ended up getting an honourary Heartbreaker out of the deal.
