Credit: Far Out / David W Baker
October 25th, 2026 · 7:15pm GMT
Anyone can spend their life trying to dissect what made Tom Petty so great at writing songs.
He wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel every time he wrote one of his classics, but sometimes a song means being at the right place at the right time when the muse shows up, and Petty was going to do everything he could to capture that moment in real time whenever he entered the studio. It wasn’t always that easy when a record wasn’t working out, but Petty found some tunes that managed to come to him with no trouble at all from the moment that he started strumming away on his guitar.
But finding that muse that Petty went to time and time again is almost like going fishing. Most of the time you might not catch anything when you have the guitar in your hands, but if you’re patient enough to pay attention to that one note that sticks out at you, that’s normally the moment where all of the great music tends to fall out of the sky, whether it’s the riff in ‘Refugee’ or the initial groove on ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’.
It’s not like Petty didn’t have some help from his fellow Heartbreakers from time to time, but there were some moments where the song was so good that he almost didn’t want to take ownership of it. ‘Southern Accents’ is still one of the most beautiful songs that he has ever made, but when you look at the amount of time that he worked on it, he admitted that there was almost something divine about the way that the whole tune took shape.
That would have normally been when any artist hit their stride as a songwriter, but even after over a decade in the business, Petty still managed to make the biggest tunes of his career by the time that he reached the late 1980s. Full Moon Fever gave him one of his biggest hits when he and Jeff Lynne started working together, but once he decided to get the band back together, Wildflowers turned into one of the greatest Heartbreakers albums that the Heartbreakers didn’t technically make.
Sure, every member of the band save for Stan Lynch contributed to the album in some way, but Petty also knew exactly what he wanted his vision to be. This was the kind of music that was coming quicker than he could even process it, and when he first started to woodshed some songs for the album, the title track managed to come out of the sky faster than it probably took most of you guys to read most of this article.
The whole thing happened in less than five minutes, and from the moment that he picked up his guitar, Petty managed to get the whole thing done with no real need to edit anything, saying, “I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it. 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 realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The recorded version feels that way as well, but the reason why it’s considered a classic also has to do with what Petty and Rick Rubin did behind the scenes. The whole thing still feels like a traditional acoustic tune, but if you look at all the moving parts behind it, it’s like a mini symphony of different musical elements all coming together for this sweet song about wishing someone the best in life.
That kind of song isn’t something that everyone manages to catch all the time, but the fact that Petty managed to catch it is what made him scared. No one was able to make something that good that quickly, and by the time that he finished the album, even Rubin remembered him being a bit spooked that the songs were as good as they were.
