My Middle Name Is Earl - The Official ILM Track-By-Track TOM PETTY Listening Thread

Twilley vibes

bob dylan's bastard florida baby on vocals. just bypassing the whole roger mcguinn thing altogether.

tom petty? bypassing roger mcguinn???

another good one! sort of a power-pop take on a CCR riff. a lot of meat-n-potatoes classic rock acts would have let the tempo sag, or let the solo wander into a two-minute, spaced-out "night" sections. the drive towards early R'n'R 45 greatness is keeping them focused. everybody sounds great too. one of my fave tracks so far.

That opening riff's a grabber.

"Strangered In The Night": My other big keeper from the deep cuts from this one. I think I first this album some time in the '00s as a "Classic Disc" airing my old local Classic Rock station did as weeknight at midnight programming. This was the immediate standout for me then too. A Springsteen (by way of CCR) street scene stripped for speed and devoid of any romance.

the vibrato effect on the harmonies also straight outta dwight twilley

No coincidence: Twilley sings harmony here!

Thematically his first nighttime narrative — Perry’s a very nocturnal guy, “Long After Dark,” “Nightwatchman,” “we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “all the bad boys are standin’ in the shadows,” etc.

I don’t think he was much for sunrises, unless he happened to still be up.

Petty! Not Perry! Stupid autocorrect.

Tom Perry=Walmart Great Value Petty

Tom Perry = Rick Perry’s younger brother who leads a cover band doing Tom Petty songs rewritten with right-wing messaging. “We don’t/ Have/ To let in these refugees”

So I checked out the Conversations With... book from the library again! On today's song:

That was the first session I brought The Heartbreakers down to. They were watching that go down, and they did the next song, and I overdubbed them onto the track. And that's when I stopped being a solo artist.

"strangered in the night" is okay, nothing too special, feels like it needs a better chorus that's not there

lyrics are...something

I love “Strangered In The Night” but the syntax/title breaks my brain bc it’s such a weird word

like i get it for the song but my brain does not enjoy reading the title, it’s reminds me of weird shitty metadata from an mp3 rip
i wanna correct it so bad!

but the song itself? Boss. Cool as hell.

Strangered in the Night by an Angel of the Morning

that reminds me that i always had a problem with "Vivrant Thing" by Q-Tip. just seeing the word repelled me a little. kinda like Trump's ""Bigrant problem" thing. the mayor of the town i live in calls the town "rurban". don't like that either. i don't know why i'm even typing all this...

i should really take it to that ILE thread...

Don’t Strangerer Around

strangered anger

Strangered, Then Fiction

xpost lol

jim gordon on drums

Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIh3hMRIAbk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5GwA6Zri4M

i like the sound on that live clip. this song is all atmosphere.

not my favorite tune on the record. that minor-to-major thing is nice but not that nice. sort of a proto-"here comes my girl"?

it's a cool riff, not so much more. the live version is pretty cool tho

studio version can't help but miss that ripping campbell solo and ultra-atmospheric intro

"Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)": More Synth Action! Weird little varispeed break @ around 1:56 forecasting those similar bits on Torpedoes. This is the first one so far that kind of outlasts its welcome, certainly could have faded out sooner, although the length might have worked if they'd thrown a screechy "Miss You" sax* over the extended coda.

*Remembering just after I typed that we're actually 1 1/2 years before "Miss You".

Also right at the top we get an early pronounced appearance of a Petty Power Grunt.

Sounds like he just expelled a big one

That vocal choice will increasingly become a problem.

The spidery guitar lick and the synth are cool, but this track is filler.

Fooled Again
I dunno about all these lukewarm
comments, guys- this one kinda rips? it’s got a lot of atmosphere & anguish & a killer groove

Specifically in my own weird brain it sounds like a cross between Seger & Alice Cooper

something about the first verse & slow build specifically reminds me of Alice’s I’m Eighteen - different arrangemts & tempos obviously but they feel like cousins or something maybe idk

and um his voice sounds great? wtf have you not heard of anguish? He’s been fooled again! He doesn’t like it!

It's not one of my faves, but I do like the range of phrasings and tonalities he gives to "I don't like it" at different points in the song. One thing on this album is I think you can hear him trying to figure out his voice and what he can do with it.

he sounds pretty angry singing it live.

i'm hearing maybe a little springsteen "darkness on the edge of town" moodiness (speaking of albums that won't be out for another couple years). but more anguish. and less, um, song.

this track is filler

yes

He doesn’t like it!

haha I picking up on that

not a bad song but I can't remember it already (I realize I've never actually heard this album before which is weird for me)

feels very first album to me, like he's honing in on what he does but it's not all quite there yet

it's actually kind of cool in that way it's going to end with American Girl, like just this transcendent moment

there's something about Rockin Around With You, the whhhhyyyy bee lonely parts, the harmony, something about it reminds me of mid period Beatles in some way that's cool

yes!!

and that repeated riff in Fooled Again reminds me of something Beatley too but I can’t quite get it

Yeah, when my wife somewhat randomly put on this album a while ago (mostly just knowing his radio songs), one of her reactions was that she didn't realize how influenced he was by the Beatles. That's always there in his stuff to some degree but I think most obviously here (and maybe on Wildflowers). You much more often see references to the Byrds, Dylan even the Stones in relation to him, but he loved him some Beatles.

Beatles & Elvis man - open your third eye it’s all right there

he’s preaching to us all

also not to be uh all rockist or whatever but analog rock records from the 70s just sound so fucking good, never got better than that era

the drums are so great

otm

yeah i agree, lotta uh “warmth”?
or some other nebulous word

Not just rock records either, there's a reason '70s funk is such a trove for hip-hop. It's the beats and bass and whatever, but it's also the vibe of it. There was this coming together of ace players and great recording equipment, in rock and soul and country, across the board.

Fooled Again: I don't mind it! There might not be enough there to justify the run time (an epic, by this album's standards), but it's okay as something to keep a moody head-bob going at the bar. There are a couple of places where it feels lik they might have been planning to come back and fill in something more sonically exciting later ("Look out!") and I'm enjoying all these swings from Tom, working out his vocal options as tipsy pointed out.

Mystery Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRSc6IBPtY

the Dead could have covered that. Phil could have sung it. did the Dead ever do a Petty song? i know Tom used to cover "Friend Of The Devil".