Tom Petty: the most direct poet in rock history
Many rock lyricists don’t really look at what they’re doing as poetry. For most people, all they can hope for is to sound somewhat coherent every time they sing, and if they happen to have some broad statement to give to the world, that may as well be an extra bonus. Tom Petty was always a bit different from normal singers, and when you listen to his music, you hear more than the sound of America; it’s the work of the most direct poet in music history.
This is strange, considering that Petty always saw his music as a bit cheap compared to the other legends of the rock world. As much as he appreciated his fans picking up one of his records, he felt that a lot of his early singles weren’t meant to be anything too special, but as he started to grow, there was something to his wordplay that was a lot more earnest than anyone else on the scene.
In songs like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’, people see vivid images of what Petty probably experienced when walking through the streets of Florida before he had a penny to his name. Whereas his heroes like Bob Dylan were writing stories that had messages about how people should live their lives, it always felt like Petty had sat next to you at a bar and was recounting his stories in the same tradition that Springsteen would adopt.
However, Springsteen’s work always took place in the world of fiction. Considering how simple Petty’s lines were, though, it’s easy to see his stories happening to anyone in real life. ‘Free Fallin” might not be the most profound lyric that anyone ever wrote, but in only a few lines, people see a vision of that bad boy who broke a little girl’s heart and is off on the open road, dreaming of something better.
And notice the qualifying word in the title there: direct. That doesn’t necessarily mean the best. If discussing the most straight-ahead poets of the rock world, it would probably be people like Dylan, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith, but midway through Petty’s career, he had a habit of putting more of himself into his songs.
Working with Johnny Cash probably didn’t hurt in aiding his songwriting, but listening to a tune like ‘Dreamville’ is achingly beautiful as he talks about a childhood that was slipping away from him. And while Petty himself had no desire to revisit albums like Echo, some lines in ‘Room at The Top’ are still hopelessly sad. His marriage was falling apart, and hearing him sing lines like ‘I love you/Please love me I’m not so bad’ is so simple yet perfectly encapsulates all of his depression.
When he did delve into traditional storytelling, it led to a song like ‘Crawling Back To You’, which may be one of his crowning achievements as a writer. Everything about the song focuses on only three chords, but Petty’s moodiness in every verse feels like a snapshot into a different world. No one really knows what the chambermaid’s history with a hapless stranger is in the second verse, but hearing him say that she ‘shook her head and let him in’ is an entire short film’s worth of character development all on its own.
More than anything, every one of Petty’s songs captures a sense of pure Americana that is about as to the point as they come. Even though he may use metaphors to get his point across more than a few times, he was never trying to throw flowery language into the mix to get a reaction. He wanted to paint a picture for the audience, and that meant that even a single word could completely change a story.
