How did Tom Petty use a toy to write an entire album?
For any true musician, inspiration isn’t limited to just a guitar or a piano. Something as odd as hearing elevator music is enough to spark the right idea for someone to either finish their song or become the catalyst to writing something entirely new out of thin air. Although Tom Petty probably had his bag of tricks refined when he started working with Rick Rubin on albums like Wildflowers and Echo, some of his greatest lines came from refrigerator magnets.
Then again, Petty couldn’t belabour over lyrics for too long. Keyboardist Benmont Tench had even said in the past that if the song wasn’t coming together organically in the studio, then Petty would ditch it because there must have been something wrong with the track. When looking at the massive amount of material for Wildflowers, though, there’s hardly a dud in sight.
Outside of being one of Petty’s greatest success stories, there’s a lot more going on in the record than most would expect out of an ageing rocker. Petty had already written mellower tunes like the title track or ‘To Find a Friend’, but there are hardly any words to describe the floating feeling that you get from hearing ‘Crawling Back to You’ or the broken relationship in the middle of ‘Hard On Me’.
Regardless of what the song meant to Petty, it was more about trying to tell some interconnecting story. No one gets to be in a band with Bob Dylan and get away clean with subpar lyrics, but when Rubin bought refrigerator magnets to put up on a music stand, Petty just took it as fate when he hadn’t finished any of the lyrics.
When discussing his time with Petty, Rubin said that the heartland rocker would reference them and make up an entire song based around what was scrawled out by these refrigerator magnets, saying, “[We] took out all of the connecting words and kept the more substantial words. It looked like a blackboard with words all over it. We would record, the band would play, and he would just look at the words and make up a song in real time. And they are some beautiful songs, and they wouldn’t have happened any other way.”
While Rubin never fully got into the specifics of which album it was, the most likely answer would be Echo. Although Petty could spin anything into lyrical gold, Wildflowers was far more indebted to the sounds of his past and the lengthy separation from his wife, so now that he was on his own for the first time, it would make sense for him to turn to what was in front of him rather than air his dirty laundry.
Petty even fessed up to not being there the whole time they were working on Echo, saying often that he had written the songs but wasn’t really driving the band in the way that he used to be. So when all else fails, it would make sense that he would look at words like “rhino” or “swing” and turn them each into ‘Rhino Skin’ and ‘Swingin’, each of which ties into his divorce in a more veiled way.
But it takes a certain type of genius to actually make all of those work in the right context. Petty could have easily made his own answer to Blood on the Tracks if he wanted to, but by using those glorified toys, he managed to make something a lot more universal than what he had on paper.
