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(Credits: Far Out \/ \u0418\u0440\u0438\u043d\u0430 \u041b\u0435\u043f\u043d\u0451\u0432\u0430)<\/p>\n
Thu 19 February 2026 0:00, UK <\/p>\n
For all of the great melodies that Tom Petty<\/a> has ever written, not enough people talk about the lyrics of his tunes. <\/p>\n The heartland rock genre might not have been the most thoughtful style of rock and roll in the world, but his slice-of-life stories are still some of the most heartfelt tunes that the rock canon has ever produced, whether that\u2019s listening to romance in\u00a0\u2018Here Comes My Girl\u2019 or the bitter end stages of a relationship on \u2018Runaway Trains\u2019. But even if he could make any song sound great, there were more than a few tunes that he wouldn\u2019t have been caught dead trying to sing.<\/p>\n Then again, it\u2019s not like all of the stories that he told knocked it out of the park by any stretch. A lot of those early Heartbreakers records are practically garage rock albums with a bit more dirt under its boots, and while the band are playing their hearts out, it\u2019s hard to take the most introspective songs like \u2018Magnolia\u2019 seriously when they are placed next to tunes that are more goofy like \u2018Baby\u2019s A Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roller\u2019. <\/p>\n But by the time that he had completed Damn the Torpedoes, he definitely had more of a handle on what he wanted to say in his lyrics. He still wasn\u2019t going to be writing Bob Dylan lyrics by any stretch, but there was a lot more depth to what he was writing on records like Long After Dark that you wouldn\u2019t have heard out of whatever rock and roll tune Grand Funk Railroad was pumping out around the same time. <\/p>\n Once he started moving into his solo career, though, Petty seemed to be having a lot more fun singing songs that were from the heart. Making up characters in his songs was certainly interesting on \u2018Something Big\u2019, but the stories in Wildflowers<\/a> had a lot more weight to them. Petty was about to go through one of the biggest shakeups of his life when he got divorced, and you can hear him starting to process everything before everything fell apart.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that everything on the record was slow and plodding by any stretch. If anything, Wildflowers is one of his most eclectic albums by a wide margin. For every beautiful acoustic jam like \u2018To Find a Friend\u2019 or the title track, there are tunes like \u2018Honey Bee\u2019 and \u2018Cabin Down Below\u2019 that help kick things back into gear. But even though \u2018You Wreck Me\u2019 would quickly become one of his biggest hits, Petty was dangerously close to throwing the entire thing in the trash.<\/p>\n