The Heartbreakers track that took Tom Petty “just a few minutes” to write
It’s not always a great idea to churn out music at a fast rate, but when you’ve got the talent to keep it at the highest quality, then there’s absolutely no reason to stop yourself from doing so. If you cast your mind back to the 1960s when The Beatles managed to release 12 albums in just eight years and when many other acts successfully managed to release two acclaimed records in the space of one calendar year, there are plenty of examples that prove it isn’t always a bad idea to push yourself to work at a rapid rate.
However, working with such haste can often get in the way of quality and cause the music to seem rushed. There are also plenty of examples where acts have opted for quantity over quality, and the albums that are released in quick succession of each other aren’t actually showing off what they can do to the best of their abilities. Hardcore fans of some bands might want to tell you otherwise, but just because they’re being well-fed by their favourite group on a regular basis doesn’t mean it’s a good yardstick by which to measure their brilliance.
It might not be a good idea to chuck out every song you write at a fast pace, but sometimes it can’t be denied that a song just comes out so naturally and can still be of the highest quality despite having been put together in a matter of minutes. Sometimes that wave of inspiration comes in such a flash that the urgency to solidify it there and then feels necessary, otherwise, that spark will be gone just as quickly as the motivation came along.
For Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, working at a fast pace wasn’t an irregular thing. In the case of one of their most beloved songs, ‘Refugee’, taken from their 1979 album Damn the Torpedoes, Petty claims that writing the song was a breeze and came to him in a matter of moments, unlike others from the same record.
Talking about how simple it was to write the classic track, Petty says that his guitarist, Mike Campbell, already had the whole track laid out for him, with a chord progression for Petty to work with. “It’s one of the first things that we actually wrote together,” he recalls. “It took minutes. Literally, just a few minutes.” Elaborating on how it came together so fortuitously, he described the scene of the studio at the time when they conceived the track. “I remember walking around the room, singing it, just circling the room. The words came very fast, and there are only two verses. And that was it. Finished.”
As impressive as Petty makes it sound, Campbell’s version of the story and the other aspects of creating the song, aside from writing it, were not so straightforward. Speaking with Songfacts in 2003 about how the track came together, Campbell did acknowledge that Petty “wrote over the music as it was, no changes, but it took us forever to actually cut the track.”
In a quest to achieve perfection on what they believed to be a golden track, Campbell claims that they recorded approximately 100 takes of the song and that, in a fit of frustration, he even decided to walk out of the studio and not return for two days to get his head straight. “I just couldn’t take the pressure anymore,” Campbell recalled of the gruelling recording sessions, “But then I came back and when we regrouped, we were actually able to get it down on tape.”
Despite the difference in difficulty between writing and recording, the group evidently managed to find a way to balance it, considering that many regard it as one of Petty’s best songs.
