Why Tom Petty gave his most American-sounding song to Rod Stewart in 1995
Tom Petty’s songwriting technique is something that I imagine a lot of us are horrendously jealous of.
For most of us, if we ever wanted to write a song that was remotely listenable, that would be one hell of a tough process. We’d spend hours pondering over different lyrics, chords, and melodies, only to find that it was nothing more than average. The same can’t be said for Tom Petty. He would sit himself down with a recording device or pen and paper, and would simply let what would become hits fall out of him.
Petty had a real knack for making up excellent pieces of music on the fly. No matter how famous a track we’re talking about, Petty was able to come up with different songs essentially on the spot. This was his process when he wrote ‘Wildflowers’, as that came out so quickly, he barely remembers actually writing it.
“I just took a deep breath, and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” he said. “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Of course, the issue is that when writing songs comes so naturally to you that you barely even need to think about what you’re doing, you’re going to wind up making some songs that sound a little bit too similar. This is exactly what happened when he wrote the track ‘Leave Virginia Alone’.
Petty wrote the song in 1995, and it was originally supposed to be on the Wildflowers album; however, this stream of consciousness was apparently a little bit too close to the last one. When he listened to the track amongst some of the other songs that he’d written for the album, he decided that they were way too similar and so decided to give it away rather than release it himself.
The question was, who do you give such a song to? Well, this is arguably one of Petty’s most American-sounding songs, not just because of the title (although it’s about a woman, not a state), but also the soulfulness of it. Thanks to these soulful elements on the track, Petty thought it would be a good idea for Rod Stewart to have the track. Stewart naturally snapped the track up and recorded it for his 1995 album A Spanner in the Works.
Stewart did a good job with the song; he was certainly one of the best artists who could have been called forward to cover it. He lends himself to this song incredibly well, as the lyrics are pretty open-ended, and so emotion from them needs to be dragged from the performance as opposed to the actual words themselves. Stewart does this incredibly well and ensures that audiences get a great deal from the song.
Of course, people still wanted to hear Petty’s rendition, and in 2020, they finally did when it was put out on the expanded album Wildflowers & All The Rest. Who did it better? Well, both singers do very different things with the songs, so it all depends on personal taste, but there’s no doubt Rod Stewart was one of the best artists to take this Petty track on.
