(Credits: Songwriters Hall of Fame)
Sat 24 January 2026 20:05, UK
Most modern musicians simply don’t have the bravery to equal what Tom Petty could do back in his prime.
He was a thorn in the side of the music industry for half of his career, and even if it pissed off the suits to no end to see him suing them and making music on his own terms, rarely has a musician stuck his neck out for all the values that rock and roll is supposed to be. Injustice wasn’t an option for Petty, but that did mean going through a few records that didn’t have the best songs that he could think of at the moment.
Then again, his discography with the Heartbreakers tells a pretty coherent story of what rock and roll is always supposed to be. Not everything they did was absolutely perfect, but when you look at their garage band roots all the way up to their work on Damn the Torpedoes, it’s the classic David-vs-Goliath story where the punk kid actually manages to get his record company to budge. They knew he was on the verge of a masterpiece, but he wasn’t going to back down until he got what he wanted.
And by the time that he went solo on Full Moon Fever, no one was going to bother arguing with him anymore. The initial plan of him going back to the drawing board after the label said that ‘Free Fallin’ wasn’t a hit is still one of the funniest lapses of judgement in music history, so when Petty decided to ditch his label for Warner Brothers, he probably thought that they at least had some taste in what true legends should sound like.
Still, it’s hard to believe anyone has had the kind of luck that Petty had during his career. This is someone who lived out every single fantasy that a kid his age had dreamed of, and by the time that he began working with Johnny Cash on some of his final records, it was like he had come full circle into becoming a true American music legend. So, naturally, this was the moment where everything started falling apart.
It was bad enough for him to have to go through the trouble of making a record like Echo after the fallout of his marriage, but having to score a film was a little bit more than he could have taken. He liked the premise of She’s the One, but even if he had talked with director Ed Burns about putting together some music, the result was the kind of album that felt like a throwaway before it was even out.
Despite having some fantastic songs, Petty felt like the album didn’t hold together like it was supposed to, saying, “I hated that record — the whole idea of it offended me. I only did it because I didn’t have anything else to do. I liked Ed and thought he was pretty sharp, so I wrote him a couple of songs. And then it kept mushrooming… I took some stuff I hadn’t used on Wildflowers, really crummy versions, badly mixed, and put them on there. It was terrible, really. I’m disappointed I did that.”
A lot of it might have been leftover tunes from his masterpiece, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. Getting Carl Wilson to perform on the song ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ is one of the most beautiful moments of Petty’s career, and while songs like ‘Angel Dream’ are among Petty’s personal favourites, the idea that anyone can look at an album with ‘Walls’ on it and call it a disappointment is absolutely insane.
But that just goes to show you how meticulous Petty was at crafting what he wanted to hear. He didn’t want to make something that ever felt half-assed, and after years of hindsight, hearing the album as Angel Dream with a bit more production flourishes behind it feels like the kind of record that he always set out to make.
Related Topics