(Credits: Tom Petty)
Sun 14 December 2025 18:30, UK
The art of making music is no doubt magical, but also a bit too trippy if you spent too long burrowing down the rabbit hole. It’s fair to say it freaked Tom Petty out a little.
Many musicians will be, perhaps understandably, somewhat precious about delving into their private processes. Writing melodies and penning lyrics is, ultimately, a very personal thing – let alone the fact that if you manage to do it well and make the bad decision to splurge all your secrets, the masses are only bound to copy you and steal your thunder.
But for Petty, the whole notion still seemed as abstract and absurd through the height of his career as it ever did from the first day he sat with a guitar in his hand. How do you exactly write a song? How do those precise words, with that exact melody, come into your head and unknowingly make a hit? It was all quite befuddling.
This beguilement, as well as a sense of terror, was something that persisted with Petty even as he entered into the twilight of his career, with literal decades of hits and world-beating success under his belt – to his utter confusion, so it seemed. “It’s kind of a dangerous business, looking really deeply into, you know, the germ that creates songs,” he said in an interview in 2014.
“I don’t like to stare at that light very long,” he mused. “I get a little superstitious about it. There is some kind of actual magic going on there. I feel like, for some reason, I was born with some kind of conduit to this energy force or whatever it is, and I can have that happen through me. If I really try to do it or sometimes when I’m not, I’m just standing somewhere, at the funniest times, something can come into your head and you think, ‘That’s a good line.’”
Those witchy spells and incantations of songwriting may have proved too much for the maestro to compute, so it was easier just to let the ideas flow as the words and rhythms seemingly just appeared on the page without him having to overthink it too much. “I don’t have a method that always works. The process is so random, and yet it keeps happening. I just look up every year or so, and I’ve got ten more songs,” he later explained.
Whether it was indeed magic or just a strong musically wired brain, Petty carried the quality that both gave him a career and equally terrified him by the bucketload. Sometimes it was better not to think about it, but when you have a lifetime of having to answer questions on how you do what you do, it must have sent him into some spins.
Of course, no one truly knows what went on behind the closed doors of Petty’s musical dynasty. He might have had a more delicate and thoughtful process than he ever liked to let on, but giving that away would have been the ultimate travesty in ruining his sonic allure. Instead, the better option was to smile, wave, and feign suspicion.
Regardless of whether it was a ruse or not, the tactic was one that won him a lot of favours in the long run. By acting like a wizard of his craft, Petty emitted the effervescent persona of the other-worldly rock star and untouchable god. Of course, the reality of the word is always going to be different, but there’s a little bit of fun to be had in playing with magic.
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