Did Tom Petty rip off a song by the Nine Inch Nails?
Ever since Tom Petty started in 1976, he always had a singular voice when writing songs. Blending the styles of everyone from The Beatles to Bob Dylan to The Byrds, the heartland rocker channelled the rock and roll of days gone by to paint a modern picture of America, painting romantic tales of everyday life on tracks like ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Free Fallin’. While Petty had found his voice by the late 1980s, one of his overlooked tracks may have been taken from the sounds of industrial rock.
Then again, Petty was never known to be an inspiration for the sounds of Ministry. By the time the first industrial rock acts were making waves in the scene, Petty had already been a living legend, working on the first Travelling Wilburys album and planting the seeds for his first proper solo album, Full Moon Fever.
As Petty set out to work with producer Jeff Lynne to create his masterpiece, another up-and-coming songwriter was about to use his inner pain as a canvas for his music. Operating out of Cleveland, Trent Reznor had put together the building blocks for Nine Inch Nails, crafting the band’s debut album by himself with Pretty Hate Machine, boasting songs like ‘Something I Can Never Have’ and ‘Head Like a Hole’.
While Petty was still working alongside Lynne while recording the next Heartbreakers album, Into the Great Wide Open, he may have accidentally taken one of his melodies from a Nine Inch Nails classic. Although ‘Learning To Fly’ and the title track were already bulletproof, the album closer ‘Built To Last’ has Reznor’s fingerprints all over it.
When asked about it, all that Petty said about it was that he accidentally took the name of the song from a Grateful Dead album. If you listen to the opening of the Nine Inch Nails track, ‘Ringfinger’, both Reznor’s album closer and Petty’s share the same chord progression.
While it’s borderline impossible to copyright the sound of two chords rubbing against each other, both songs have the same construction, starting with a four-on-the-floor drum beat for a few bars before the lead vocal comes in. Even when listening to both vocal melodies, Petty and Reznor share similar intervallic leaps throughout both tracks, only for Petty to take things differently in the rest of the verse.
So…was Petty listening to Nine Inch Nails around this time? While the easy answer would be no, Petty was still in tune with what was happening in music then, even counting Nirvana as one of his favourite acts, so it’s at least possible. If Petty wasn’t familiar with Reznor’s work at the time, he would eventually get acquainted when another one of Reznor’s compositions got the classic rock treatment.
Although many fans remember ‘Hurt’ these days for the Johnny Cash version, the session players backing ‘The Man In Black’ were Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, the backbone of The Heartbreakers. Even though Petty may not have been looking to take ideas from the industrial rock legends, the coincidences surrounding both songs are pretty uncanny.
