‘Room At The Top’: the Tom Petty song from his darkest period that he refused to revisit
Despite his legacy, the path to stardom was far from smooth sailing for Tom Petty. However, instead of letting it swallow him, he let it guide his music, allowing his storytelling to become a kaleidoscope of tales about struggle. As he put it when describing the inspiration behind his song ‘American Girl’: “It was the start of writing about people who are longing for something else in life, something better than they have.”
Petty might have become endeared to music after discovering Elvis Presley, but his creative vision was more significantly shaped by his own self-discovery. Things might have been easier had he embraced the commercialism of his era, but his heart remained with his heroes, which impassioned him to pursue a path that better reflected who he wanted to be as an artist.
However, such bravery revealed many flaws in an increasingly imperfect music industry, harnessed by the overwhelming feeling that people weren’t being honest enough about how it made them feel. As a result, Petty became a conduit for the challenges that he felt and a mouthpiece for those around him, even if they weren’t immediately aware of it.
Beyond ‘American Girl’, many of Petty’s songs deal with these themes, like ‘Refugee’, which tackled the beauty of freedom and choice as “a reaction to the pressures of the music business”. Another was the Janis Joplin-inspired ‘The Waiting’, which centred around something the singer said on television about uncertainty and success, like “waiting for your dreams and not knowing if they will come true.”
That said, while Petty rarely struggles to revisit these gems despite the darkness they seemed to emerge from, there’s one standout that he finds particularly difficult to swallow: the mysterious track ‘Room At The Top’ from his 1999 record Echo. The song came from a distinctively difficult time for Petty when he felt “withdrawn” because of all the difficulties he was experiencing, like his failing marriage and his relationship with his children.
As he explained to LA Times: “That Echo album was one of the dark times. I can’t even play it. It scares me because I was so down when I made it. It was the toughest period of my life. The character in that song is really desperate. It was the time of my divorce and the aftermath, when I was having to rebuild a lot of relationships, including those with my daughters.”
“There was a lot of misunderstanding. I probably spent a year withdrawn from everyone, just staying home. It was a lonely, weird time, and I guess a lot of that is captured in the song.”
Writing about the temptations of “escapism”, it’s easy to detect Petty’s darkness in the song. In fact, he may not even remember much about writing it, given the low point he reached while working on Echo. At one point, he even said Kate Hudson repeatedly urged him to perform the song, but he refused, saying, “It would have to be a cold day in hell before I play that.”
While the lyrics aren’t overtly dark, the weight of Petty’s connection to the song adds a macabre undertone that’s impossible to ignore. This is clear from the opening verse: “I got a room at the top of the world tonight / I can see everything tonight /I got a room where everyone / Can have a drink and forget those things / That went wrong in their life”.
