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

"A Woman In Love" was their first (or at least one of their first) music videos. It's another one that's legacy was hurt a little by not being included on Greatest Hits.

Duck Dunn on bass!

mike lives off of his "the boys of summer" money. the rest is gravy.

Campbell wrote "The Heart of the Matter" with Henley and JD Souther, too. That album also has a couple of tracks written with Stan Lynch, and Benmont and Tench both get writing credits, along with Mike, on the previous Henley album.

Lynch is/was one of the Donster's main lyrical collaborators. There's some good stories about them over in the Don'n'Glenn listening thread.

well yeah

Listen to Her Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH7nUIHLIC0

such a beaut. okay okay this is the power pop perfection that sang freud was after. i get it. those guitars. oof. they could take those guitars at the end to the moon and back and they just stop instead! that takes guts.

been looking forward to this one since we started! such a jam, from the opening chords onward.

This song is so good. Byrdsy-southern-power-pop that somehow doesn't sound at all like Big Star.

this is about don henley, right...? (kidding...)

that opening is totally "so sad about us", no?

a magnificent power pop song -- his most beatlesque and byrds-like, a convolution of "feel a whole lot better" and "every little thing." he pulls off the beatles trick of making an unorthodox song structure sound totally organic, mostly because the lyrics fit so well. that chorus is a bar of 2/4 ("listen to her..."), two bars of 4/4, another bar of 2/4 ("tell her what to..."), then two bars of 4/4, maybe a bar of 6/4 ("don't need..."), then two more of 4/4. "every little thing" is similarly oddball with some stray 6/4 measures in the verses.

the bridge is great too. "creep up behind her" harks back to "he crept back in her memory." somehow in my mind this song involves the same american girl at a slightly earlier point in time. as it turns out she does listen to her heart, and sadly it doesn't work out so well for tom. in the best power pop tradition. maybe "breakdown" is also about her! "i'm not afraid of you running away"? he doth protest too much. "i need to know" is also about her.

here's how i'd rate the songs in the "girl who ran away" tetralogy, but they're all really good:
1) american girl
2) listen to her heart
3) breakdown
4) i need to know

(1) and (2) are probably my (1) and (2) all-time favorite tom petty songs. i'm really going to miss power pop tom as we move along.

xp- it’s just one of these: Songs with the sus4-triad-sus2-triad Figure

Or "Feel a Whole Lot Better," which he covers later. And the Beatles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrDikOz8YSU

"so sad about us" is a great comparison too! and "needles and pins"!

it definitely has a lot of early who in its dna

it’s absolutely one of my fav petty songs, little masterpiece of build. gets surprisingly emotional when tench comes in at the end

Yep.

The cocaine line, which the label nixed, is perfect.

love love LOVE
so goddamn great!

"when the time comes" has really grown on me

this is the most new wave petty record for sure

i need to know and listen to her heart have always been favorites, just classic shit

someone mentioned it upthread but really wild neither of them (or both) were selected to lead off the album, especially in those days when vinyl sequencing still meant a lot

also since petty was def not afraid to frontload his albums with the hits

Seriously, how did this song not kick off the album? One of the greatest opening couplets in rock history, and just a beautiful little melody. Love this song.

yeah he's great at a lot of things, but doing a nervier, tighter version of the Byrds will always be my fav Petty mode

the little jam out at the end is so great

appreciate the time signature breakdown, TSF

yeah his switching to quarter notes in the melody for the phrase "don't need you" is so perfect, riding over those extra two beats and kissing off his rival at the same time.

yeah the "don't need you" delivery is the best hook in the song, after the verse riff.

Petty also very much finding his voice as a singer here, amidst a lot of dubious experiments. multi-tracked, clearly-enunciating Petty just sounds terrific over anything.

where's calzino when you need'em?

he'd rather listen to anything else than her heart.

the greatest song gene clark never wrote. every detail perfect. including the way it's sequenced after "i need to know."

"i need to know" is also about her.

yes, and the sequence matters. reverse them and everything gets much darker, with him promising the money & cocaine dude in song #1 that his lines will never work on her, and then discovering in song #2 that, oops, they did, and now all he can do is complain as she walks away: "who woulda thought that you'd fall for his line?" the actual sequence gives him a fighting chance that he was wrong about her in "i need to know" and she didn't in fact fall for his line.

(or maybe "listen to her heart" is just the story he makes up to make himself feel better -- a whole lot better, as it were -- after she does run off with the money and the cocaine. there's a good screenplay here, either way!)

he pulls off the beatles trick of making an unorthodox song structure sound totally organic

otm

Many posts ago but:

orchestra luna. everyone should own their album. i think me and andy zax are the only big fans of that album of people i know though.

Scott and I don’t know each other irl but as Biden says, come on man. I pretty much joined ilm to talk about Orchestra Luna.

My first question, about Orchestra Luna

Okay, back to Petty.

"Listen To Her Heart": Classic. Byrds fully updated for 1978. Another one I didn't hear much on the radio even though it was on Greatest Hits. I think I actually first heard it on a PBS airing of the '97(?) Fillmore special. In a time when the radio is packed with the dudes with the money and cocaine (and Champagne, as the label suggested for a replacement lyric) talking about their girls/women, Petty takes a look from the other side, taking those guys to task and trusting she will make the right decision. Not much on paper: two short verses separated by the chorus (halfway in now), a short guitar break takes us to the bridge before a quick final chorus and a 30-second coda. They make the absolute most of it. Of everything here on this album, this most clearly points to the breakthrough of ...Torpedoes.

Gene Clark comparisons OTM, this slots in perfectly alongside his Byrds songs and stuff on the Gosdin Bros. album. Didn't he (or McGuinn) cover it in the '80s?

I can't really see, but I kind of assume Stan is rocking a coke vial necklace on the album cover.

"It was a gift from Henley!"

"It came with a thesaurus!"

Indeed, verily.

Love this one, for all reasons stated above. The thing that really elevate the cocaine line is not so much the illicitness as the specificity. In five words — "your money and your cocaine" — Petty outlines exactly the guy he's up against, and dismisses him at the same time.

It's kind of funny that even as the entire music industry was inhaling dump trucks full of coke every day, it also became a go-to signifier of superficiality and sleaze. I guess they knew whereof they spoke.

soon enough petty would have plenty of money and cocaine

So many contemporary rock and rollers would've blamed HER for falling for the guy w/the money and the cocaine.

DON: well, yeah.

soon enough he would be declaring bankruptcy and suing his label and hiding the master tapes of his new album from them.

Petty was so strapped for cash that the band went on a mini tour to raise money for the case. Dubbing it The Lawsuit Tour, the band wore bitterness on their sleeves, even selling shirts to fans that read “Why MCA?” across the front.

Even when the label thought they could seize the tapes for the new record, Petty got crafty with storing them somewhere else. After the label got permission to seize the recordings from the studio, Petty convinced one of his guitar techs to hide the tapes in an undisclosed location. That way, when Petty was asked about the whereabouts of the tapes in court, he wouldn’t be lying when he said he didn’t know.

As the trial was wrapping up, MCA finally buckled, knowing that Petty would never back down from getting his songs back. Instead of welcoming him back to MCA, the label gave Petty his imprint, Backstreet Records, where he could release his albums without worrying about any of his royalties falling into the wrong hands.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-reason-why-tom-petty-sued-his-own-label/

THEN he would have money and cocaine. he had to wait a bit.

"Scott and I don’t know each other irl but as Biden says, come on man. I pretty much joined ilm to talk about Orchestra Luna."

I stand corrected! i must have missed that thread. my apologies.

I also love the laconic roll of "Buddy, you don't even know her" — almost like it's one long word.

Surely the best use of "buddy" in popular song.

Petty achieves a rare trick here: he can speak confidently about HER heart without sounding like he controls her. It's in the way he comes down on those last syllables: "She's gonna listen to her heart, it's gonna tell her what to do..."