(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 31 August 2025 18:00, UK
Tom Petty isn’t just a songwriter, he’s an artist who has managed to tap into a musical style that can only ever be described as his, a genre of music which surrounds him and him alone.
He credited his guitarist, Mike Campbell, a lot with helping him discover this unique style of music. Such a collaboration can often inflate egos, but these two found each other and left all the machismo bravado at the door.
The songwriting duo put the quality of their music before anything else. This meant they were constantly pushing one another to make creative strides in the best way they could. Equally, it meant they wound up becoming familiar with a style of music which only ever pertains to them.
“Mike really is the best in rock and roll,” said Petty. “I’d be lost without him. I’ve played with Michael since 1970, so I wouldn’t understand playing with anyone else. We write together, and we’ve developed a whole style of playing together.”
Not every song that Petty wrote was done with Campbell, but that early songwriting relationship instilled confidence and gave him a unique tone of voice. Petty didn’t have to stay within strict creative guidelines, he knew that if he let his ideas run wild, good music would follow closely behind. As such, there are some songs that he penned that he didn’t even have to try that hard to write. What others would give for such a talent, to be able to get classics out of concept with just a few chords and a voice.
‘Free Fallin’ is one of Petty’s most renowned songs, and he managed to write it alongside Jeff Lynne incredibly quickly. “I was just playing on a keyboard and Jeff was listening to this song. And I played that lick. And he said, ‘Whew, that’s good.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Yeah’,” recalled Petty when discussing how one of his biggest songs came to be. While the initial lick seemingly came out of nowhere, the lyrics were done in the moment in a bid to make Lynne laugh more than anything. “Almost to make Jeff laugh, I ad-libbed the verses. And he’s there with his tape-recorder recording it.”
Writing songs in the moment with a friend is one thing, but Petty took his creative ability one step further on the track ‘Wildflowers’. A lot of great songs happen in the heat of a moment, as spontaneity can be a great tool for a busy mind; however, Petty hardly even recalled getting the song ‘Wildflowers’ down. The track was done in what he called a “stream of consciousness,” as it all came out in one fell swoop. There’s no official world record for the shortest ever time to write a hit song, but this must be close.
“I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” he said, “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
If we’re honest, music is at its purest when delivered without contrived visions of creation. To allow one’s mind to move into full flow and produce its expression is to surely give your audience the grandest of experiences.
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