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

His first top ten since "Don't Do Me Like That" (or "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around").

it must have taken an inconceivable amount of restraint not to add another bridge or break or chorus whatever. just take it and run with it.

Two things sink this for me - the airless, compressed Lynne backing vocals, and literally trying to drum up some tension in the third verse with pasted-in snare rolls.

No one, Petty least, expected Full Moon Fever, a solo album, to be the biggest-selling album of his career, selling more copies than Damn the Torpedoes. I'm not sure what zeitgeist it exploited -- I was there and still can't figure it out. His first album with three top 40 singles, all of which get airplay somewhere today ("I Won't Back Down," "Runnin' Down a Dream"), a bunch of other big ones on the mainstream rock chart ("A Face in the Crowd," "Yer So Bad," "Love is a Long Road"). The damn thing kept selling and selling well into 1990. A total triumph for Petty and the Wilbury sound.

ventura boulevard

the backing vocals are by far the best thing about the song, fuiud

Hoo boy here we go. Totally agree that this marks a shift toward the '90s — specifically the nascent AAA radio format, which "Free Fallin'" with its bright acoustic strumming was built for. (This is the year after "Fast Car" and the same year as "Closer to Fine" — the folkies are back, man.)

"Free Fallin'" is undeniable as a song imo, even though I've never loved the Lynne production. As a by-now longtime Petty fan, I was a bit put off by Full Moon Fever. It felt kind of light and slight to me. I like several of the songs on it, but mostly even the ones I like don't feel like they have much to them.

Actually, I don't need to tell you what I thought of it then because my college newspaper has helpfully archived my contemporaneous review lol: https://www.psucollegian.com/archives/arts/tom-petty-loosens-up-on-lightweight-solo-album/article_4e88464c-9d8d-5241-884b-857cb2be00fe.html

Please forgive my literally sophomoric prose (I was 19). But this is the conclusion: "Full Moon Fever is not a great album by any standards, and certainly not by Petty's; at the same time, though, its pleasingly effortless air underlines Petty's natural talent as a singer, songwriter and musician."

I'd make the same argument about Let Me Down (I've Had Enough): slight in intention, cumulatively impressive, lingers in the memory.

idk I can't separate the goodness of "Free Fallin'" from Lynne's creaminess. If it sounded like Indigo Girls or Tracy Chapman or a Wildflowers number it would've bored me.

(I don't choose to listen to "Free Fallin' these days)

Yeah I can't imagine putting on "Free Fallin'" on purpose, but that's partly because I don't need to, I'll hear it soon enough one way or another.

this song will always remind me of "janie's got a gun". same year. ubiquitous videos. two inescapable albums.

i do like "free fallin'" a lot despite the fact that i have heard it four million times. apparently it just becomes an element in the air. like birdsong. it wouldn't occur to me to be sick of it. its never very intrusive.

It just occurred to me: the ultimate southern boy namechecks several L.A. streets.

i never get tired of the other two big ones either. hey if i can hear "fly like an eagle" and "rock'n me" ten million times and not hate them...

i'm just gonna get this out of the way and admit that "runnin' down a dream" might be my fave TP song. for me it is the perfect blend of petty lyrics & delivery/campbell guitar. i don't know what jeff lynne had to do with that one. doesn't seem like they needed him much for it.

Yeah, "Runnin' Down a Dream" is definitely the one song I still listen to from this record.

The next one always raises my heartrate immediately at the opening slide lick, never gets old

do we have Lynne to thank for all the 12 string guitar because if so, god bless

to me it's the simplicity of the song (same chords all the way through) and the way he strains for the word "free," and the way that the word "fallin'" totally topples the initial sense of "free." it's also a neat trick when campbell's chomping electric guitar drives home the little syncopation that the acoustic guitar's been doing all along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DCV9Fg-w0

After the heroin revelations, I'm struck by the lyrics to this song: verse is a story song about a girl, like "American Girl" or "Magnolia," but the pre-chorus and chorus seems to then go into a first-person description of being high on opiates.

This is some years before his opiate phase, at least by his account. "Zombie Zoo" later in the album makes him seem like mostly a tourist to LA grime.

Let's keep in mind: "Free Fallin'" was the third single after, in order, "I Won't Back Down" and "Runnin' Down a Dream."

its really slow. that beat is so slow. its slow and minimal. though there is a lot going on. it doesn't feel like a lot when you hear it. that voice just carries the whole thing. if you hear it in a car that voice just cuts through everything. i'll bet a lot of country singers and songwriters were like, damn, i want that song. how do i write a song like that? they had to be jealous.

before i forget...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9iAqzfJ9Gw

and then there is...this...

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pie-fumrkRM

otm

this is a very popular song for african-american reaction video people to listen to and declare a masterpiece.

Pimp C and Bun B have the best taste in white music

Free Fallin' is fantastic imho. As usual Tom's having trouble keeping the lyric entirely on topic from line to line, but this is one of the ones where that ends up working well for the ineffable feelings being captured. The situation(s) he sketches out all do seem, somehow, to tie into that powerful central free/freefall shift.

The "nothing" that he's falling out into now reminds me of the darkness out the window of that 747...

Yes! I was thinking that too.

And even my favorite lyric from "Even the Losers" - "two cars parked on the overpass/ rocks hit the water like broken glass" - has you looking down from a height.

Yeah, that free/freefall shift is amazing, there's nothing like it. This song can't really be overplayed for me; every time I hear the "free" turn into "freefallin" I feel like a cartoon character who is running in midair and has just looked down.

In Lynne's favor, Petty's vocals sound amazing, one of his best performances.

xp And it is the same nothing, isn't it? Like, it's essentially the same story. There was a girl, he stopped wanting to be with her, and then he followed this perfectly normal need for freedom out to its logical conclusion, out over the edge of the earth into nothingness. The difference is just that this is a truly great pop song, with that quality of feeling intensely alive no matter how dark the material is.

It's also an existential update of a classic Petty theme - everything good haunted by its dark side, every happy relationship tinted by its inevitable doom. Here the end of the relationship, poses "freedom" that turns out to be, potentially, oblivion.

The instrumental track is the right match, too - just gentle enough, just uplifting enough, that you can choose to push back the darkness, roll the top down and cruise down the highway on the "free" side of things. Lots of space for Petty's echoing but newly plainspoken and super clear voice. The drumming is, as in Traveling Wilburys, a little bit robotic and demo-like, but the few special touches (like the change-up for the last verse) count for a lot.

I can see, in the abstract, that someone could object to those warm pulses of pasted-in Lynne backing vocals, duplicating the rhythm guitar part, but... Nah, they're great!

love that post, LD.

I Won't Back Down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlTJrNJ5lA

another one that country songwriters could marvel at. at the economy and supreme catchiness. you could write a hundred songs and never write anything this inevitable.

Mike Campbell playing a perfect imitation Harrison slide part

This isn't a personal favorite but I'm never bummed to hear it come on. tipsy's vintage review (a great artifact - thank you for sharing!) is not wrong about the Bryan Adams qualities of the lightly chugging groove. The generic ground-standing not-backin'-down sentiments also fit with that... we're definitely heading into VH1 territory. But the little push of energy going into the chorus, from the drums, the Lynne (and Harrison?) vox, and then the HEYYYYYYYYYYY really saves things. (Jakob Dylan may have been taking notes.)

I always forget about the mellower "I-won't back-down" vocal part, that's a little less compelling tbh. Don't mind the pretty little synth buried in the mix.

those jeff lynne backing vocals are basically AI before AI. you could say that jeff and george were singing on it but you could put anyone in that video and say it was them. its a completely generic sound. same with ringo's lynne-drums.

Ringo, to be fair, is not actually playing on the record (though I wish he did) - it's Phil Jones, Heartbreakers percussionist, who apparently was brought in at the start of these sessions for "Free Fallin'" and stayed to play on the entire album. No idea why Ringo is drum-syncing to his performance.

god, I forgot Ringo drummed on it.

Tom Petty's response to Sam Smith was A+:

Petty himself shrugged it off, saying in a statement that “I have never had any hard feelings toward Sam” and that “all my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by.”

i'm confused -- did ringo drum on this or not? also, who is sam and why should tom petty have had hard feelings toward him and what got out the studio door?

lol I was also wondering, scrolling up got me nothing

No, Phil Jones drums -- I posted before the correction.

"Sam" is "Sam Smith." You guys know what happened with "Stay With Me"?

what is "Stay With Me"?

guessing this is like a "you stole my song" issue?

yeah one of the 10 or so most popular songs of the 2010s