Tom Petty’s greatest piece of writing: “That may be my favourite”
Throughout every era of his career, Tom Petty was nothing if not a student of songwriting.
As much as people liked the idea of putting together a bunch of tunes that sounded good on the radio, Petty was constantly trying to challenge himself up until the day he died, which explains why even his later records feature some of his best work. But even lessons from the likes of George Harrison and Bob Dylan couldn’t match what he could sing naturally whenever he had a guitar in his hand.
As the former Beatle once said, Petty was one of the few people in the music industry that wasn’t full of shit, and you can hear that in every single track he plays. There isn’t one moment throughout his career where he ever seemed to phone it in or make something that wasn’t authentic, and when listening to a lot of his songs, you can hear that he always had the same fire that he had when he was playing in Mudcrutch trying to figure out what made rock and roll sound so good in the first place.
But that doesn’t mean every single record is exactly a joy for him to revisit. Since he could only be honest, that also means there are some ugly back pages in a lot of his songs, whether that’s listening to him barely holding himself together throughout the album Echo or sounding like he’s slowly becoming sick of the Heartbreakers when making Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). By that logic, Southern Accents should have been a mess, and yet it’s one of the most interesting albums he ever made.
Though his vision for a strong concept album about living in the South didn’t pan out, all the blood, sweat and tears that went into making the record made for some of his most interesting left turns. ‘Rebels’ is the best picture of what that concept album would have looked like, but it’s hard to take it seriously when it’s next to wild psychedelic trips like ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ or soulful jams like ‘Make It Better’, the latter of which Petty never wanted to play ever again.
Somewhere in between the cocaine-fuelled haze of the record, though, Petty hit on one of the most beautiful melodies he ever thought of. Compared to all of his greatest ballads, the title track is an absolute masterpiece, only needing a solo piano and a subtle heartbeat for Petty to tell his life story, from being proud of his Southern accent to dreaming of going back to a simpler time when his mother would be there with him.
And listening back to his records, Petty was always proud of that tune above every other track, saying, “That may be my favorite among my songs–just in terms of a piece of pure writing. I remember writing it very vividly. It was in the middle of the night and I was playing it on the piano at home in Encino. I was just singing into my cassette recorder and suddenly these words came out. I was at the point in my career where I was very much trying to find some new ground. I thought I had used up what I had started with and I wanted a new direction.”
There’s a lot of heart and passion in this song, but the reason why it works so well is also because of how tragic it is. Petty’s home life was far from happy throughout his teen years, and while he was dealing with a father that wanted nothing to do with him, a lot of these images of living a simpler life was a reality that he wished he could have had but never truly got to feel.
But if he was robbed of that kind of reality as a child, he was going to make sure that he got to make something beautiful for the rest of his family later down the line. Life might not be as simple or beautiful as what he talks about in this song, but we can only hope that fate will give us those moments every now and again.
