(Credits: Far Out / The Bigger Picture)
Sun 16 November 2025 16:00, UK
What would you stake on something you believed in? Would you rest your entire career on it? Because I know Tom Petty would.
By the time an artist has finished making an album, it’s hard to understate the connection they have to the work. Not only has it likely been a long time coming, written over an extended period and then patiently carved out in the studio. But chances are, there’s something real there. Those songs are likely about real experiences, real emotions and real memories. It’s a piece of them transplanted onto tape, a real piece of the person behind it all, now captured and immortalised in art.
Not to mention the sheer effort that has to go into making something like that, by the time an album is done, it has been nurtured and pored over. If an artist doesn’t come out of that process deeply attached to their own project, something has gone wrong.
However, normal human insecurity often creeps in. It’s rare to hear an artist outrightly say that they believe their own creation to be something truly incredible and miraculous, even if they might feel in. But for Tom Petty, his belief in one of his projects was so strong that he couldn’t be humble about it. It was so strong that he genuinely thought he might lose all hope if the world didn’t agree with him that he’d made something amazing.
“I lived with that album for a year before I put it out and I was just crazy about it!” he said about his 1989 solo debut, Full Moon Fever, adding, “It was embarrassing how excited I was!”. Part of that comes down to the typical process of making an album with all its effort and delays, but mostly, Petty’s obsessive belief in the album came because it seemed that he was the only person backing it.
He’d sat with it for so long because his label, at first, refused to put it out. They didn’t think it contained enough hits yet to be financially viable and kept trying to get Petty to change it or write something more foolproof that would sell. But he refused, sticking to his guns and backing his own creation all the way.
Luckily, the main sceptics at the label soon got out of the way, and the path was cleared for the record to come out. Still putting everything behind the album, Petty’s belief in it was unshakable to such an extent that he genuinely feared it could cause a collapse.
“If it failed I think I wouldn’t want to do it anymore,” he said, genuinely believing that had the album not worked or succeeded, it would completely ruin any sense of belief he had in the music world. If Full Moon Fever didn’t work for him, he simply didn’t want any part of it or any place in an industry that would let a project like that flop.
In particular, a good part of that all hinged on one track. “I was so sure about ‘Free Fallin’,’ I never got tired of hearing it,” he said, despite his label initially claiming there were no hits. But, as Petty already knew, they were wrong. The album landed in the charts, and ‘Free Fallin’ put it there, becoming one of Petty’s most well-known and beloved tracks.
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