(Credits: Songwriters Hall of Fame)
Mon 9 March 2026 19:00, UK
One of the most successful albums of Tom Petty’s career, 1989’s solo effort Full Moon Fever, was famously born out of pure spontaneity.
Starting with a casual chat with producer Jeff Lynne, a Christmastime jam session, an overheard conversation about a club called the Zombie Zoo, and next thing you know, you’ve got a top-five album and three massive hit singles in the forms of ‘Free Fallin’, ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’, and ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
It was a bit unfortunate for Petty’s usual bandmates that Full Moon Fever wasn’t an official Heartbreakers record, but any hard feelings were patched over pretty quickly, as it was well understood that Petty was a prolific and passionate songwriter, and it was hard to predict where his whims might take him. Even the phrase “full moon fever” was a direct reference to this, with the frontman explaining it as a “little term I use when I’m doing things and I don’t know why”.
In the end, the only Petty album that outsold Full Moon Fever was his Greatest Hits collection, released in 1993, which traced his evolution from the Heartbreakers’ breakout hit, 1976’s ‘American Girl’, up through the then newly released hit ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance.’ Banger for banger, the best of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers can go head to head with any American band of the past 50 years, and yet, from the perspective of their fearless leader, there was something almost sacrilegious about an album devoid of any missteps.
Petty might have been gifted with the ability to write perfect, instantly hummable pop songs, but his even greater skill was making those songs sound loose and off-the-cuff, rather than overly refined or tinkered with. He loved racking up hours in the recording studio and laying waste to reams of tape, but it wasn’t in search of the perfect take but on a hunt for an unexpected moment, a gaff, a misspoken lyric, an interesting new noise.
“We fire engineers for missing those moments on tape,” Petty told Musician magazine in 1983. “They only happen once. At the end of an album, we have rooms and rooms full of tape. Sometimes we sell it back to the studio and have them bulk-erase it. We really have to explore songs to find out what’s there, and that takes a lot of time. The band is almost too smart for its own good. That self-consciousness can take over, so you almost have to trick them onto the record.”
Petty always seemed hyperaware of the danger of coming across too pretentious or self-indulgent in his music, and routinely balanced any heavier ballad with something light or even downright goofy, such as on Full Moon Fever, he recruited one of his rock heroes, Del Shannon, to make barnyard animal noises with him for a pointless filler track that surprisingly made the final cut.
Plenty of other similar experiments never saw the light of day, however, which he hoped to resolve in the future. “Someday I’d like to release ‘The Worst of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ with the outtakes,” he said, noting that a lot of perfectly good tunes are left off records simply because they don’t fit the vibe of their neighbouring tracks.
“Personally, I don’t care what comes next when I’m listening to music. I can go from Led Zeppelin to George Jones, but most people don’t like that kind of juxtaposition,” he added.
Sadly, Petty died in 2017 without getting to see this “Worst of” compilation come to fruition. A year later, the compilation An American Treasure did include many rare demos and outtakes from the Heartbreakers’ history, but most of them were, unsurprisingly, too good to slag off.