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Credit: Songwriters Hall of Fame<\/p>\n
Sat 6 June 2026 19:00, UK <\/p>\n
Not every song that Tom Petty<\/a> came out needed to redefine what rock and roll was supposed to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t afraid to sound like his influences every time he made a new record, and even when some of the biggest names in rock and roll were by his side, it wasn\u2019t out of the question for Petty to throw a few songs onto his albums that were fairly mindless for the time. Any artist that went on for as long as he did usually had a little bit of filler in their discography, but Petty felt that some of his finest work did end up getting forgotten somewhere along the line on his less-remembered albums.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not like every one of Petty\u2019s low lights were meant to be undiscovered gems by any stretch. Long After Dark is more than a little bit forgettable during his classic run of albums, and even after working with a legend like Bob Dylan, hearing him and his band cutting loose on Let Me Up (I\u2019ve Had Enough) is the kind of thing that works best for only a few songs<\/a> before it starts getting too monotonous.<\/p>\n He may have had to go through a lot of those albums to reach Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers, but the staggering lows of the late 1990s weren\u2019t going to be easy to get over. His messy divorce was already starting to show itself in a lot of the songs he was writing for Wildflowers,<\/a> and when that wave finally hit him, you could hear him slowly trying to put himself back together throughout most of Echo.<\/p>\n Compared to every other Petty album, this is the one where Petty feels the most distant. He wrote all the songs, and he\u2019s the one singing on the majority of the record, but he wasn\u2019t looking to make hits or anything. Half of the album is more than a little bit depressing, but Petty felt that listening back to a song like \u2018Billy the Kid\u2019 made him think that the record wasn\u2019t given the time of day like it should have.<\/p>\n The tune isn\u2019t one of the band\u2019s catchiest tunes and certainly doesn\u2019t have their best playing, but in terms of saying what he wanted to say, Petty knew that the tune didn\u2019t deserve to get relegated to a standard album track, saying<\/a>, \u201cI thought it was one of my best songs ever\u2014and nobody even noticed it [laughs]. No one at the label. I kept saying, \u2018There\u2019s this song that I really think is good. I\u2019d bet the farm on this song.\u2019 I am disappointed.\u201d<\/p>\n Then again, I\u2019m inclined to agree with the label on this one. The song is still one of the best depictions of what Petty felt like after being knocked on his ass, but there are simply some more great songs on the album that do a better job at painting that picture. The title track was probably never going to be a single considering it\u2019s six minutes long, but \u2018Lonesome Sundown\u2019 is one of the most raw vocal performances Petty ever gave, almost sounding like he\u2019s on the verge of tears by the time the end of the chorus comes on.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not like the band were going to go out of their way to promote the record\u2019s deeper cuts, either. The bigger problem going on on this album was the issues that were happening right in front of them with Howie Epstein, and even if the band were trying their best to help him straighten himself out<\/a>, there was no chance that they were going to be able to make everything work and still have time to tell everyone about the deep cuts on the album that everyone ignored.<\/p>\n \u2018Billy the Kid\u2019 is no \u2018Southern Accents\u2019 or \u2018American Girl\u2019 by any means, but when you look at the time in Petty\u2019s life, it\u2019s easy to understand what made him go to bat for this kind of song. He understood what he was up against when dealing with a broken heart, and his determination in this song to be knocked down and still find the strength to keep going is the best message that his fans could have hoped for from him.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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