The Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks duet we never got to hear
Everyone usually has their own brand of supergroup in their idea before they’ve heard them play a note of music together. Even though it’s easy to put together a few artists in a room and hope for sparks to fly, there are only so many times that you can get them together before you realise that the chemistry isn’t there. While Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks may have hit it off from the first time they played together, one duet they recorded, ‘Apartment Song’, never saw the light of day.
By the time that Petty had become a superstar, Nicks was already becoming his biggest fan. After going through some of the most troubled recording sessions anyone could have imagined for the album Rumours, Nicks started to listen to what Petty was doing to inform her solo career, saying that she would have rather joined Petty’s band than her own.
Although Nicks managed to make her solo album on good terms with the members of her group, she knew immediately that she wanted to work with Petty. After asking producer Jimmy Iovine to produce her latest record, Nicks said she wanted Petty to write her a song, which would eventually turn into Petty’s beloved deep cut ‘Insider’.
Electing to give her ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ instead, Nicks would become a constant in Petty’s life on the road. Since he had to deal with the fallout of his house burning down in the late 1980s, Nicks would become his confidante half the time, usually working with him to get his act together and even turning up for the odd duet onstage.
After coming back down to Earth, Petty started to wonder what he could do outside the confines of the Heartbreakers. Having already been part of the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, Petty wanted to go even further with producer Jeff Lynne, working on what would become the album Full Moon Fever with Lynne serving as the producer on every song.
While the album is better known these days for tracks like ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Free Fallin’’, ‘The Apartment Song’ dated back a few years, being a mainstay in Petty’s demo collections and even being considered for the initial batch of songs featured on the album Southern Accents. Even though the piece is kept incredibly sparse on the final recording, Petty admitted that there’s a tape that exists with him and Nicks singing the song as a duet.
Speaking with Paul Zollo, Petty remembered first laying the track down when Nicks came to visit but kept her off the final recording, saying, “I think, at that point, I wanted it to be solo. I had never really pictured it being a duet. But Stevie was there, and I showed her the song I’d written. And she liked it and sang along to it. Probably only got recorded once.”
As much as Petty wanted to be a solo artist, the sound of the record feels perfect for a duet. Since both verses seem to be telling different zany stories and the chorus talks about feeling lonely, it could easily be about two lovers trying to convince themselves that they’ve moved on without their other half while slowly crying themselves to sleep every night. Petty may have had help from Lynne and even George Harrison on Full Moon Fever, but including Nicks could have made this deep cut more than just another fun rockabilly-style tune.
