(Credits: Ирина Лепнёва)
Sun 18 January 2026 19:14, UK
It would be impossible for anyone to go through every single Tom Petty song to dissect what made him tick.
There are countless bootlegs of the heartland rocker out there in the world and even demos that most thought would be buried forever, and yet when listening to even the simplest tunes in his catalogue, there are certain lines that even Petty didn’t realise were all that significant until after the fact. He knew better than to question what the muse put into his brain, but he didn’t understand why some people were so far off the mark when it came to his best work.
Granted, it’s not always that easy to judge when something is bound to become a classic. Southern Accents was tricky for the rest of the band to figure out before trimming it down to a single record, and even when Full Moon Fever became Petty’s second wind, he had to make sure that he had the right people listen to it after his original record company thought it didn’t have any singles on it.
After he got his freedom from his record label and moved over to Warner Bros, he seemed at least a little bit free when it came to his new tunes. Wildflowers was the sound of someone making some of the most emotional music of his career, and even if it was undercut by the tragic fallout that turned up on Echo, Petty was still looking to write songs that meant more than the typical love song.
And when listening to a lot of the radio at the time, he was wondering where all of the fun had gone. There had been plenty of new artists that were challenging the status quo and taking risks around the time that Nirvana were popping up, but in the 2000s, all he saw was the commercialised version of the music industry. This was the age when American Idol first premiered, and the ugly side of radio ended up offended once Petty put out The Last DJ.
But when listening to the feedback, Petty remembered everyone paying attention to the single rather than the rest of the record, saying, “No, that album was a shame, really. My idea with that album was to sort of do an album about morals in the 21st century. It seemed so obvious to me. The drag about it to me is that it’s a really good piece of music. And the music became so overlooked because of the lyrics. The lyrics became the focal point, and I think, in reading about the album, you’d never know that it’s got this really nice music, and melodies, and humor.”
In all fairness, the music is a massive step up than what was happening on Echo. Petty seemed to be truly lost and unsure of where to go after his divorce, but even if the title track of this album sounds like an old man talking about how music was so much better back in his day, he’s got a lot more to say about the world on the album. A certain innocence was gone from the industry, and Petty didn’t want to see it be snuffed out completely.
This probably explains why a song like ‘Dreamville’ sounds so classic compared to everything else out at the time. The image of a kid being driven through Gainesville, Florida by his mom and first falling in love with music isn’t the kind of person that comes around very often anymore, and even when he drops the concept completely, tunes like ‘You and Me’ are fantastic little rock and roll songs for what they were.
So while The Last DJ wasn’t going to win him any favours with the crowd that watched American Idol every single week, Petty wasn’t making music for one subsect of people anymore. He was simply showing everyone what could happen if we let rockstars be picked out on game shows, and the modern age still has failed to take those lessons to heart.
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