![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Tom-Petty-Musician-2012-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Sun 21 December 2025 11:30, UK <\/p>\n
No artist can claim to have every single album etched in history as an all-time classic. For every great record, there are always a few that don\u2019t quite hit the mark, and some of the greatest artists of all time find themselves slipping ever so slightly when they are in the game for too long. Even over multiple decades of rock and roll, though, Tom Petty<\/a> remained a songwriting tour de force both in and out of The Heartbreakers.<\/p>\n From his debut all the way up to his final album Hypnotic Eye, Petty was always about pushing his songwriting one step further. For every great tune across his albums, fans also got his take on the world, whether it\u2019s the love that he gets from his wife or complex stories about how time can pass someone by in an instant. Then again, even Petty can admit that some albums don\u2019t quite resonate.<\/p>\n When looking back on his career in the documentary\u00a0Runnin\u2019 Down a Dream,\u00a0Petty mentioned two albums that he thought weren\u2019t up to his usual standard, starting with 1982\u2019s\u00a0Long After Dark.\u00a0Despite giving him an early MTV staple with the song \u2018You Got Lucky\u2019, Petty wasn\u2019t amazed by the final product, remembering, \u201cThere was a lot of stuff left off of\u00a0Long After Dark\u00a0that I think would have made it a better album. It felt like a tread-water album.\u201d<\/p>\n A difficult fifth record suggested that perhaps The Heartbreakers needed a break themselves as, apart from the glitz of ever-improving recording budgets, the album is a bit of a dud. Even Tom Petty himself wasn\u2019t a fan, which probably says all you need to know.<\/p>\n One of the highlights of the B-sides around this time was the ballad \u2018Keeping Me Alive\u2019, which boasts a folksy acoustic feel as Petty sings about domestic bliss. The rest of the album also has its fair share of solid tracks, like the single \u2018Change of Heart\u2019 evoking the wall of sound that rockers normally hear out of bands like Electric Light Orchestra.<\/p>\n The rest of the decade wasn\u2019t as kind to Petty, with a house fire almost taking his life and a nightmare recording session to make the album\u00a0Southern Accents.\u00a0Although Petty was proud of the album in retrospect, he wasn\u2019t nearly as kind to\u00a0Let Me Up (I\u2019ve Had Enough),\u00a0which has gone down as a low light in his catalogue. After working with Bob Dylan on the single \u2018Jammin Me\u2019, Petty didn\u2019t have much to say for the rest of the album, remarking that the title spoke for itself.<\/p>\n The songs were supposed to sound as if they were recorded live, and tried to bring Petty back to his acoustic slapping roots. Still, bar a few wins, the album is a little too shiny for an apparently stripped-back LP. More proof, that every artist is different in their own way and while it will work for others, Petty needed a plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the \u201980s came to a close, Petty\u2019s career was about to take off again after working in the classic rock supergroup The Traveling Wilburys. Having become friends with ELO frontman Jeff Lynne, Petty sculpted his first true solo album, Full Moon Fever, which put him back on top again with some of the biggest singles of his career, like \u2018I Won\u2019t Back Down\u2019 and \u2018Free Fallin\u2019<\/a>\u2018. <\/p>\n Once the next generation of grunge rockers came along, Petty became a rock and roll elder statesman, gaining the respect of younger rockers like Pearl Jam alongside his contemporaries like Neil Young. There might be the odd album that doesn\u2019t click with Petty, but the rest of his career saw him pouring his soul into every single album he made.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Sun 21 December 2025 11:30, UK No artist can claim to have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216,36498],"class_list":{"0":"post-361881","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-tom-petty"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}