(Credits: Far Out / The Bigger Picture)
Sat 31 January 2026 1:30, UK
There was never a day that went by that Tom Petty wasn’t proud to play rock and roll.
He might not have been the hardest rocker the world had ever seen, but his way of playing off the Heartbreakers resulted in some of the purest songs that the rock canon has ever produced. But even for a track record as consistent as his, Petty knew that some songs were bound to get grating after playing them one too many times.
That being said, there aren’t too many songs in Petty’s discography that are outright bad. There are some duds here and there and tunes that don’t work, but he doesn’t have that one album that everyone points and laughs at as the nadir of his catalogue. He was much more interested in making every tune count, and even on records that aren’t as great, like Echo or even Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), there are usually one or two songs that stand out as a notch above anything else that he was doing back then.
And the important thing was that Petty never stopped growing, either. Not many people can say that one of their best albums came well after their time in the sun, but even if Wildflowers is one of the finest records in Petty’s catalogue, he didn’t want to stop there. The Last DJ and Highway Companion had some fantastic tunes, and even when reforming his childhood band Mudcrutch, he was still aiming to make the best tunes he could when working on ‘I Forgive It All’ and ‘Crystal River’.
Then again, when you’ve been playing music for that long, there are bound to be a few tunes that are a little bit naive compared to everything else. Petty famously hated ‘Make It Better’ before the record was even out that long, and while a song like ‘How Many More Days’ was beloved by some members of his crew, he all but guaranteed that he would never play it live as long as he lived.
It takes a lot for a song like ‘American Girl’ to enter rock and roll history, but even for a song that epitomises heartland rock, Petty wasn’t so sure about ‘Breakdown’ from the same record. It had a moody guitar line and one of the best performances that Mike Campbell ever gave, but even with a great backing track leading the charge, Petty felt that it wasn’t worth digging the song up when playing some of his greatest hits tours.
He wanted to keep the set fresh, and no amount of seniority was going to protect ‘Breakdown’ when he took it out of the set, saying, “‘Breakdown’ I don’t want to play very often. I think because early in our career we played it so much, I think I relate it to being 25. It doesn’t feel like a song I would sing now. But never say never. That’s one we don’t play very much. Hardly ever.” It does certainly have the attitude of a 25-year-old at points, but that doesn’t inherently make it a bad song, either.
If anything, it shows the kind of punk attitude that PEtty had at that age. He wasn’t going to back down to anybody that got in between him and his songs, and for someone that got their start right in the middle of the punk movement, hearing a tune like this gave him a lot more grit than anything coming out of John Lydon’s mouth at the time. And the same could be said for his later work as well.
Mojo was already a fairly bluesy album, so if he wanted to throw in tunes like ‘I Should Have Known It’, ‘Breakdown’ would have fit right in next to it on the setlist if he wanted to. The tune might be a bit more simplistic than what Petty would become used to, but sometimes the simplest arrangements have the greatest impact when they come out of the speakers.
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