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

Totally agree there are bad production choices all over the place on this album. On the plus side I think Petty was trying out new things (horns, female backing vox, sitar ...), but on the minus side a lot of them are misfires. We can talk more about DCAHNM when we get there, but that's a fascinating song in the catalog — I've never loved it, but I think it also did a lot to propel Petty's career to its late '80s/early '90s prominence.

i still think if this is his big money bloated celebrity producer cocaine album its not embarrassing or anything. still listenable. from what i remember! like i said, haven't heard it in forever.

Savage is by far my fave Eurythmics album

Mine too and it's become a common opinion; it's especially beloved by UK critics.

Christgau wrote the following about his dismissal of Annie Lennox's Diva: "he kept her dishonest." Wrong. She deserved the credit (and I love Diva).

Southern Accents is their weakest album to date, but, yeah, not an embarrassment.

In the Zollo book Petty was like, "yeah, everyone recommended this hot English keyboard guy, Dave Stewart, who did 'Sweet Things Are Made of This' then I meet him and he's not a keyboard guy at all! He's a guitarist!" (Annie Lennox played most of the complicated synth/keyboard parts).

When I interviewed Keith LeBlanc last year, he had some nice things to say about Lennox (he played on Diva):

And Annie Lennox, she was really cool, too. She’s a real singer. A lot of singers have to punch in things and get Auto-Tuned in, but she would go in the studio, just nail it right there, with the musicians. So there was a lot of collaboration there. She left room for that, she was really open and nice, really honest, you know? When it comes right down to it, for something to be really good, it’s got to be really honest. It can’t be fake good. It’s got to be actual good. And Annie left room for that.

It Ain't Nothin' To Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKiaaPd5RLY

two minutes too long. haha, okay, this sounds like cocaine for sure.

i like that little tom verlaine-y part they pop in there a few times. could live without most of the rest of it. rock guys playing funk. somehow the stones made it work.

Wait till you hear "Make It Better"!

I think "Make It Better" works better than this one, which is just a mess sonically and structurally.

Wow, this is a trainwreck - maybe the clunkiest thing we've heard from them so far. Tom's put an atypical amount of work into the lyrics (as on Rebels - maybe the biggest benefit from finally having time off between records), but it comes off as a serious case of "well, we can sift out the best bits for the extended club mix."

tom, you got to give it up

i do kinda appreciate tench going disco mike garson on this tho

It wasn't until their next album -- their most ignored -- that he mastered the throwaway.

rebels - damn that opening gtr groove sounds a lot like a sped up "all that heaven will allow." (or maybe vice versa, since "tunnel of love" was still two and a half years away.)

it ain't nothin' to me - side 1 track 2 filler perhaps explains why there are only 9 tracks on the album. i kinda like the one gtr lick on the choruses that kinda sounds like mj's "black and white."

(now i've gotta go back and catch up on the last couple weeks of this thread.)

"wasted life," which i don't think i've ever heard before, is gorgeous.

Yeah, it's a good 'un.

Wow, everything everyone has said about this is dead on. It's at least two minutes too long, probably three (a minute of noises and jabber before the song even starts, and the two minutes at the end, especially the "avant-garde" piano solo), and it's like a bad combination of disco-funk Stones and Oingo Boingo. And the lyrics are terrible, like Petty's answer to Don Henley's "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" or something.

I do like the Verlaine-y part, but yeah what a weird mishmash

It's like someone was trying to steer them into gigs as the band playing at a party in an 80s high school comedy.

Don't Come Around Here No More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8

The stories about recording of this song is bonkers.

This is a record in search of a singer. To my ears Petty fails. Every time I hear the way he sings "I'm not waiting any loner" and "You tangle my emotions" I act like villagers in Guernica.

annie lennox could have done a good job with it.

i am pretty sure i voted for this in the top 5 of that music video ballot poll

hey!

STOP

HEY!!!

This is one where Petty's strangled vocals AND the massive, booming cocaine soundscape both work incredibly well for me. The echoing drum hits and each additional element just coil around each other in this perpetual forward motion spiral, an endless-staircase illusion. Fabulous 80s digital psychedelia.

Nothing about this really has much to do with not coming around here no more, and when the beautifully lush haze of backing vocals envelops the chorus, they could just as easily be singing basically anything. "We've got to save the whales," maybe. But Petty's miserable verses and especially the anguished "admit it's OVERRRRRRRRR" are the actual cotter pins holding the whole thing together. (His cry of "eeghleyh!" at 3:18 probably could have been dropped out.)

The only thing is - and perhaps the rest of the album will prove me wrong - I don't think it really establishes a viable model for further songs in this vein. Until the reins are loosened for the coda, the Heartbreakers are just too marginal to the proceedings. It's sort of like "Yesterday," if the other Beatles had come in just to tap on the violin cases or run their fingers noisily up their guitar strings. And yet, one of Petty's most massive and undeniable singles and earworms. I've probably listened to it twelve times in the past couple days --- I usually wait til the day of, but this one has been tempting me for the last week or more.

Wonder how Petty fans responded when they heard that drum machine in the summer of '85? That Coral guitar (not a sitar!) found an echo in another summer-of-1985 hit "Everytime You Go Away."

I really hate the synth string solo on this song

Just an awful sound

Oh, that's my favorite part, especially when the backup singers float above it.

Ah Really? It sits in the mix well, but to me the melody is so dumb and the sound just deflates the… “monumental”-ness of the rest of the arrangement

i'm givin' up!

Until the reins are loosened for the coda, the Heartbreakers are just too marginal to the proceedings.

Funny story about the first time I heard this — I was a big enough fan to know that a new single was on the way, and I happened to turn on the radio the day it was released just in time to catch only the coda. Which I thought was great! I was like, seems like a rocker, can't wait to hear the whole thing. I was pretty confused when I did.

I don't hate the song, I get why it was a hit — that sinuous sitar sounded good on the radio, the video was cool, it all sounded extremely 1985. But it's always felt like a bit of a slog to me. And yeah, for those averse to his more creative vocal stylings, this one has plenty of them.

holy moly this video is fucking bonkers, never seen it!

ha really?

when I saw him live around 2000 he pulled a mad hatters hat out of a smoking guitar case for this one, guess thats SOP

holy moly this video is fucking bonkers, never seen it!

― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Wednesday, May 8, 2024 10:11 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

incredible, it is like the music video (i would love to see it for the first time again)

The popularity of the video made the song seem bigger than it was -- it peaked at #13.

#2 on the Album Rock charts though! (Today's Mainstream Rock.)

Meandering goofy live version from 1991 that's compellingly great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jDoXitEO0

this one works for me the same way "you got lucky" does -- an effective combination of his own influences and modern radio production. another good driving song. i could do without the double-time part at the end which breaks the mood.

Mentioned this earlier but now that we're at the actual song, I think both this song and video are key to establishing the Tom Petty persona that dominated the late '80s to mid '90s, and maybe really the rest of his career. It's where he crosses over to "Gen X's Favorite Boomer Uncle" status, this kind of hip older dude (he turned 35 in '85) who knows how to MTV and seems like he's probably fun to party with. Full Moon Fever was the full realization of that character, but I think this is where it starts.

otm

the melody, performance and production around the basic seven-syllable hook is mesmerizing and i could listen to a loop of that for 20 minutes straight, even the part where he tries to make five syllables ("you daaar-ken my door") fill the space. i'm not sure anything else in the song is necessary, especially, yeah...

i could do without the double-time part at the end which breaks the mood.

...that

It's where he crosses over to "Gen X's Favorite Boomer Uncle" status, this kind of hip older dude (he turned 35 in '85) who knows how to MTV and seems like he's probably fun to party with. Full Moon Fever was the full realization of that character, but I think this is where it starts.

Southern Accents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po8RCVlQZGc

Like many people, my intro was the Johnny Cash cover.

Yeah, Cash treated it like a standard and essentially turned it into one. I think it's a good song, lovely melody, and as far as expressions of Southern pride go it's on the less noxious end of the spectrum.

dolly covered it too, for a tom petty tribute album.

I like Dolly's version, except for the "not ashamed" coda — I get it, I know where she's coming from (literally — I know Sevier County pretty well), but it smacks just a little of uninterrogated Skynyrd-style Southern defiance.