(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
Thu 19 February 2026 0:00, UK
For all of the great melodies that Tom Petty has ever written, not enough people talk about the lyrics of his tunes.
The heartland rock genre might not have been the most thoughtful style of rock and roll in the world, but his slice-of-life stories are still some of the most heartfelt tunes that the rock canon has ever produced, whether that’s listening to romance in ‘Here Comes My Girl’ or the bitter end stages of a relationship on ‘Runaway Trains’. But even if he could make any song sound great, there were more than a few tunes that he wouldn’t have been caught dead trying to sing.
Then again, it’s not like all of the stories that he told knocked it out of the park by any stretch. A lot of those early Heartbreakers records are practically garage rock albums with a bit more dirt under its boots, and while the band are playing their hearts out, it’s hard to take the most introspective songs like ‘Magnolia’ seriously when they are placed next to tunes that are more goofy like ‘Baby’s A Rock ‘n’ Roller’.
But by the time that he had completed Damn the Torpedoes, he definitely had more of a handle on what he wanted to say in his lyrics. He still wasn’t going to be writing Bob Dylan lyrics by any stretch, but there was a lot more depth to what he was writing on records like Long After Dark that you wouldn’t have heard out of whatever rock and roll tune Grand Funk Railroad was pumping out around the same time.
Once he started moving into his solo career, though, Petty seemed to be having a lot more fun singing songs that were from the heart. Making up characters in his songs was certainly interesting on ‘Something Big’, but the stories in Wildflowers had a lot more weight to them. Petty was about to go through one of the biggest shakeups of his life when he got divorced, and you can hear him starting to process everything before everything fell apart.
That’s not to say that everything on the record was slow and plodding by any stretch. If anything, Wildflowers is one of his most eclectic albums by a wide margin. For every beautiful acoustic jam like ‘To Find a Friend’ or the title track, there are tunes like ‘Honey Bee’ and ‘Cabin Down Below’ that help kick things back into gear. But even though ‘You Wreck Me’ would quickly become one of his biggest hits, Petty was dangerously close to throwing the entire thing in the trash.
Mike Campbell was the one who brought the idea to the band, but the guitarist remembered getting the cold shoulder from Petty when the original line was ‘You Rock Me’, saying, “I loved it, and I loved the exuberance of the music, and the lyrics were funny, but he never seemed to be too enamored with it. And he kept going, ‘The chorus is f—ed. … ‘You rock me, baby.’ Eventually, he came up [to me and said], ‘I got it. Let’s change ‘rock’ to ‘wreck.’ [As Benmont Tench] would say, that’s a songwriter’s genius.”
It’s the simplest change in the world, but the word ‘wreck’ completely recontextualises the entire thing. ‘You Rock Me’ is the kind of doofy lyric that Def Leppard could have had trademarked back in the day if they wanted to, but given Petty’s situation, hearing him sing about a woman’s love that absolutely knocks him out is a lot more poetic than the generic rock and roll word salad.
But what else would you expect from a mind like Petty’s? This is someone that came up with the entire chorus for ‘Even the Losers’ on the spot as the tape rolled, so if something that great could fall out of the sky with him not even thinking about it, there was no limit to where he could go if he only had to change one word.