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

the verses of "what are you doin' in my life" bear a more than passing resemblance to the verses of madonna's "jimmy jimmy." but where she pays it off with a sublime chorus, he throws it away. which is to say i feel the exact opposite of this:

The chorus is catchy but

the verses of "what are you doin' in my life" bear a more than passing resemblance to the verses of madonna's "jimmy jimmy." but where she pays it off with a sublime chorus, he throws it away. which is to say i feel the exact opposite of this:

The chorus is catchy but

casa dega is really good!!!

― brimstead,

Yup! Shoulda made the album before "Louisiana Rain" -- more local geography.

i liked having the DDMLT single with Casa Dega on b-side exclusively for all those years. Kept it like a secret (that i listened to over and over)

Louisiana Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6y4-Rtf0W0

Casa Dega

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZlgx9uiK18

It's Rainin' Again

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

i am b-side myself that i've never heard casa dega before.

yeah i don't know why they chose louisiana rain over casa dega unless casa dega was recorded a little later? louisiana rain is a snooze.

"Casa Dega" sounds like an ode to something from the late '60s? My mind's tugged.

i guess i again get some bob seger vibes from it.

I definitely liked it better when I thought he was singing about "the wizard in the rain." I like it though! A little tether back to those country bar band slow-dance numbers. Seger is a good comparison. I'd probably prefer two really good short songs to one okay 6-minute one, but if they didn't have a wild new-wave rave-up to finish the album on, I think this is the right kind of conclusion for it.

I like "Louisiana Rain," even though it's somehow never quite felt like a "Tom Petty" song to me? Like he was trying on different songwriting guises and that was his country-rock one or something. I know it dates to Mudcrutch, right? Thematically, maybe he should have held onto it for another five years and put it on Southern Accents.

Love the verse about the "English refugee."

Been busy. Let's get this Friday Rock Block Petty Party on the move!

"You Tell Me": A patented mid-tempo chugger, slots in good at this point in the album. Would do better stuff like this in the future.

"What Are You Doin' In My Life?": For a guy who wasn't that famous (yet), TP sure had a problem with stalkers and possessive types. Cool pile-on middle-8. Campbell on the slide!

"Louisiana Rain": More studio noise at the beginning! Followed by Tench doing New Wave Procul Harum or something. All this giving way to...Thomas Earl Petty, Country Crooner. A fave discovery when I finally picked up this album. More slide! Seger-esque, yes. Also reminds me of somewhere Skynyrd could have gone as they eased into a Country groove.

"Casa Dega": Spotify threw this at me after one of the earlier albums wrapped up. A winner, nice little yearner. Could have slotted in at end of Torpedoes, or even as a penultimate track (especially if you cut that extra stuff off the beginning of "Louisiana Rain") without affecting the run time too much putting the album at around 40 minutes after the addition).

"It's Rainin' Again": A studio goof with the T.E. Petty Blooze Band. Kinda respect how obviously thrown away it is without taking up too much time, a mistake made by many other toss offs.

"Casa Dega" is great - never heard it before. The beginning sounds like a punchier take on Under the Boardwalk.

The palmistry reading in "Casa Dega" places the song in Cassadaga, FL:

Cassadaga (a Seneca Indian word meaning "Water beneath the rocks") is a small unincorporated community located in Volusia County, Florida, United States, just north of Deltona. It is especially known for having many psychics and mediums, and has consequently been named the "Psychic Capital of the World".

it had serious intense “empty street at 2am” vibes to me

(“Casa dega”)

Yeah the Bright Eyes album Cassadaga is named for the same place.

Petty's childhood home

Pilgrimage to Tom Petty's childhood home today - plus the neighborhood park nearby that he hung out at has been re-named Tom Petty Park. pic.twitter.com/kX5P8eCPG6

— stevecohen (@stevecohen) December 31, 2023

The Waiting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMyCa35_mOg

https://i.discogs.com/_wsS6IxU_YbgAOQ-mK2MbBMhMJNkMX2ChdyijAERoAg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:596/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQxMjQx/OS0xNTU4OTk5MTE5/LTU2ODQuanBlZw.jpeg

such a great song. top ten petty for sure. the video is so nice too. videos would get a little more...complicated after 1981.

random thoughts: same feel as "even the losers." band sounds great. there's no reason this has to be 4:03. there's a voice he uses in the chorus, in his lower register, that is quintessentially tom petty but i'm not sure he's used it until here. love the yeah yeahs. the pedestrian chords over the chorus are a little bit of a comedown after the yeah yeah buildup.

is this the quintessential Petty song?

perfect song, no notes

the chords on the chorus are 1-4-5 but who cares when the melody is so strong? did a message so simple really need a tritone substitution or something?

Yeah definitely on the Mt. Rushmore of Petty songs. Also as I said upthread the first Petty song I remember hearing, in the 7th grade lunchroom. I imagine it was probably the "yeah yeah/yeah yeah" part that stood out above the din.

He says the title inspiration came from a Janis Joplin quote about touring and playing live, waiting for the show to start.

Also, I guess this is just how music works for me memory-wise, but that particular moment in the lunchroom is literally the only thing I remember of the two months I spent at that school before we moved that year. Zero else, but I remember the lunchroom clearly, and I think only because I peg this song to it.

this was a later-in-life discovery for me --- it rules, but wasn't in that top tier of endless radio rotation Petty songs by the time I was paying attention in the mid-90s. so it always feels like a hidden gem almost. the chorus builds up beautifully, each repetition of it is a complete little journey. really good use of the tool-belt of vocal stylings he's been testing out all this time.

That's interesting. "The Waiting" has always been on AOR down here. For a few people it's their favorite Petty.

When the C-part of "The Waiting" hits that guitar solo is one of my all-time favorite rock and roll moments.

A Woman In Love (It's Not Me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDYErlu5Kc

another one for the TP canon. Tom had obviously been reading Madame Bovary. that's a pretty complex relationship song. not a go-away-little-girl-come-here-little-girl pop song. more like a marriage song. there is real stuff in it. he loves her because she would let the little stuff go! a nice insight.

the "it's not me" in the title might be a little confusing...

Campbell stayed pissed off that "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" prevented "A Woman in Love" from charting higher.

if adult sentiments mean lugubrious tempos, minor key laments and four-and-a-half minute songs, i'll take "listen to her heart." that's one gigantic tom tom drum that begins the song.

I didn't know 'A Woman in Love' at the time nor did I hear it on the radio: I discovered in the early '00s on that second comp.

i don't mind the tempo. i like that song. the guitars sound great. and yeah lyrically we are in ann beattie territory. which is era-appropriate. the narrator listing the things he loves about her NOT REALIZING that all those little things that she let slide added up and made her disgusted with him, thus, the affair with the community college English as a Second Language instructor.

haha! my interpretive skills clearly need some refinement.

i'm a close reader...

this song isn’t slow at all? unless we mean something else by lugubrious

Love this song, love the mournful falling guitar line, and I think it represents a further refinement/evolution of Petty's singing. Especially on the verses, where he brings a lot of emotional color and complexity — he's sad, hurt, resentful but also still in love and more than anything afraid of being left alone.

Favorite delivery is on "Well alright, do what you want/Don't try to talk, don't say nothin'" — where he so clearly means the opposite of what he's saying. It has all the passive aggressiveness of a real relationship breakdown.

In the oral conversations with Paul Zollo, Petty is mischievous about his influence on the slow/fast Nirvana dynamic.

this song isn’t slow at all? unless we mean something else by lugubrious

i guess i'm comparing it to the tempos on the first two albums which were notably peppy. this song sounds like it has the power pop sentiments of those first records superimposed on the radio-rock-like mode he's headed toward.

We've also firmly entered the Varispeed era, where producers were messing with tracks, slowing them down, tweaking the tempos a bit, not just for pitch correction but to give some peppy songs a dreamier/draggier feel. Petty, the Cars, AC/DC, all sorts of stuff with weird variable keys and pitches. There's a song on the next Petty album where even the piano is seemingly tuned down, which indicates they slowed down the whole track.

I do find this one a little woozy. Not aimless exactly, and I like some of the instrumental stuff (which at this point kinda suggest fellow Byrd-o-philes R.E.M.). Just always feels like a bit of a momentum-killer for me. Y'all are gonna get me to put in the work to make out Petty's lyrics though... I'd believe that there's craft and subtlety there.

i thought of r.e.m. listening to "the waiting" yesterday actually.

"The Waiting": Another one of his absolute hook monsters. "Yeah, the waiting was the hardest part, but now we're here and we plan on staying awhile..." A radio staple and in a lot of ways for me the stereotypical Tom Petty song.

"A Woman In Love (It's Not Me)": Possibly my favorite Petty track, definitely the one that got me seriously back into him in 2014. I was working on a project that summer and was frequently carpooling to locations with my boss, who had SiriusXM. Hypnotic Eye was coming out, so their Rock stations were doing a lot of promotion by playing interviews and digging deeper into the catalogue. One afternoon they threw out this one and that was it. I don't think I'd ever heard it on terrestrial radio before, not even on "Deep Cut" shows. Over the next few months I picked up all the early albums from the $5 CD bins at Walmart and Fry's.

Back to the song itself, the band is firing on all cylinders, but special praise to Lynch, who -- among other cool things -- finds a different way into each chorus, a cool trick I wish other drummers would try from time to time.

i also love "woman in love," the atmosphere in the verses kind of welcomes us to the 80s, while the chorus is a full southern rock wailer