(Credits: Far Out / Tom Petty)
Sun 26 April 2026 17:00, UK
For all of the accolades that Tom Petty has received over the years, people tend to forget how great he was at coming up with just the right lyric for every one of his songs.
He didn’t like the idea of half-assing his way through a song that had a decent hook, and in those magical moments on record, all it took was the right time and place and the red light to be on to capture magic in the studio. But even in the context of his albums, there’s a special place reserved for what he and the Heartbreakers did on Wildflowers.
While the album is technically a solo album, that is one of the most trivial technicalities in the history of music. Every single member of the band with the exception of Stan Lynch was in the record, and since Steve Ferrone eventually became a Heartbreaker once the band was finished up with the album, it practically had every member of the band on those songs from front to end. And without Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench playing guitar and piano, the record wouldn’t sound nearly as beautiful as it does.
There are even a handful of songs that you wouldn’t think that Petty would have been capable of. He was already going through a fairly heavy divorce without even knowing it, but compared to the straight ahead optimism of a lot of his greatest songs, you can tell that he was going for something a bit moodier than before when he wrote tunes like ‘Hard on Me’ and ‘It’s Good to Be King’.
But even with the more authentic approach to music, ‘Crawling Back to You’ is one of the most atmospheric tunes that he ever made. There isn’t too much going on in the song that wouldn’t fit on one of their mainline albums, but every single verse of the song seems like another character in this grand story where all of them are dealing with the same people, commitments, or even vices that keep them afloat.
Petty already knew he had a great song, but the line that always stuck to him was the line ‘most things I worry about never happen anyway’, saying, “I was really pleased with that line because that’s me creeping into the song. I worry so much and you can make a list of what you were worried about and it never happens.” And while Ferrone said that the line “stuck out like a sore thumb” to him in the mix, it didn’t take the rest of the band long to come around on it, either.
Especially when looking at how the lyric fits with the song itself, Tench had to admit that they were onto something truly extraordinary with that tune, saying, “The music has a mood, and I remember my hands on the piano, but I have no recollection of playing the actual take. And that’s a good sign. When you black out stone-cold sober, then you’re inside the music. And for me, that’s one of my favourite things that we ever did.”
But the power of that one line is about more than the optimistic side of Petty creeping in. In fact, it manages to work on both ends of the emotional spectrum, really. Most people can get themselves worried sick about something that’s never going to happen, but there are just as many people chasing after something that they’re never going to catch as well, and that line becomes strangely melancholic when you look at it that way.
Then again, I prefer to see it like how Petty looks at the song whenever he makes his own version of the tune. He could have kept running away from what was bothering him for as long as he could, but if he let the world carry him where he needed to go from time to time, he could still make some of the best music that he ever made.
