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

Out in the streets
Thinking aloud

I’m all about that simple 3 note guitar part in the chorus

yeah side 1 of this album whips

I don't love either of the last two, they're fine but feel more like sketches. But that's also how I feel about a lot of the album, obviously the legions who made it his best-selling record didn't see it that way.

nice warm 12-string bath at 2:10.

That three-note hook is creepily hypnotic. Sinister.

god i love petty when he's sad and galaxy brained. this one reminds me of "it's good to be king" on wildflowers. so morose.

jeez "Love Is A Long Road" is more of a Tom Petty ripoff than that Sam Smith song! I feel like someone should have pulled him aside regarding that chorus.

so far this first side reminds me of this space i've been in where i'm years-deep into a relationship and things are getting hard and confusing and really real and i'm doing a lot of self-excavating and ending up in these places where i'm asking myself "what's the point", going deep in the deep end and holding my breath too much. also maybe depressed. i haven't been good about keeping up with this thread so i wonder if there were traces of his depression in the music before this album.

but god he made some glorious and brilliant 'i'm actually depressed' songs. my favorite tom mode. wildflowers has some great ones. i was thinking i can't wait until we get to that one because i'm actually familiar with it. one thing about wildflowers though is he's really weird about women on it. like he can't help turning into his dad or something.

god i love petty when he's sad and galaxy brained. this one reminds me of "it's good to be king" on wildflowers. so morose.

― he/him hoo-hah (map)

I had no idea -- I can hear the sonic connection.

booming posts, amp

*map

thanks :)

re: Depression in Petty's lyrics - I think "Straight into Darkness" fits the bill.

"Face in the Crowd" - agreed about that three-note guitar figure. The Lynne signatur of a steady, brightly chugging drum track is a little distracting here. Something about this is a little too clean and "pro" for me. Oddly it almost makes me think of a deep cut on one of the last couple REM albums. It's an okay song though. I'm surprised to realize it doesn't close out Side A!

side one isn’t over until you hear “hello cd listeners…”

Runnin' Down A Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1D3a5eDJIs

great driving song, nice fast pace -- there'd better not be any traffic when this one comes on. focused lyrics. some actual interaction between the solo guitar and the drums. there's one point durint the (excellent) solo where i could swear he borrows a johnny thunders lick.

campbell’s best solo

is “runnin down a dream” the last-ever classic rock song? dont mean “modern” rock songs that get play on classic rock radio. feel like this is an endpoint for that entire era

unless it’s “mary jane’s last dance” haha, though that one has more in common with the adult alternative hits of its time

That riff is so basic and feels so primal that it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before. (Or maybe they did, god knows there's plenty of blooz-rock I've never heard.) So good. And yeah, the solo is terrific. Petty is good here, nice vocal and the lyrics work, but Campbell is the star imo.

Plus as a Winsor McCay aficionado I like the video.

it's sort of the "dazed & confused" riff sped up.

"it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before" is the Petty credo imo

yeah this one rocks. otm about the interaction between guitar and drums --- this is still very locked-down rhythmically, but absolutely conveys a band enjoying rockin' out with a rockin' riff, and it is absolutely perfect highway music. Petty's delivery is beautiful, too, especially on "The last three days, the rain was unstoppable." secretly the best hook of the song, next to that brilliantly focused little riff. i shudder to imagine a younger Petty squeezing that line out in Bobcat Dylanthwait mode.

"last classic rock" song is fascinating. looking at some of the year-end charts, I think the only competition might be "Mixed Emotions" and the Pump singles (all 1989) and maybe "Blaze of Glory," "Black Velvet" and "Hard to Handle" (1990), though I can no longer remember if classic rock stations used to play those. out of all of them, "Running Down a Dream" seems closest to the center of the format, and surely wins out on recurrent spins, ime. in any case, i've long felt Petty was definitely the last classic rock artist - I think this maybe got discussed in the run-up to the classic rock ballot poll.

have also long meant to start a thread asking what kind of "mystery" we think Tom Petty is "working on" in this song. it'd be good theme music for a juiced-up new Hardy Boys TV series, that's for sure.

love the strumming responses in the chorus. and yeah the outro solo is one of those transcendent ones that makes it seem like there are a billion chord changes or something… and such a feel.

As a kid I thought the lyric was “born wherever it leads”, like he was describing some cliche crime fiction thing

the strumming responses are sililar to "queen of hearts."

similar

i was very close once to making a playlist on youtube of live versions of this song because i kept searching for them. i just love that forward momentum so much. and every live solo is awesome. one live clip from 1991 and one from right before the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihzbaj-zoi0

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

that last one the last time they would ever play it with tom.

I relate very much to these lyrics. There’s a real sadness to it. The dream here is anything better than what he’s currently doing, but he has no idea what that is. So he does what most American searchers do- he gets in his car and drives, hoping to find something more meaningful

"A Face in the Crowd" has always been a favorite, very haunting quality

i probably heard both songs at around the same time (back in the summer of '89), but I always associate "Face In The Crowd" with the Cure's "Lovesong"

totally get that

“face in the crowd” was kind of scary to me as a kid, it sounds like an endless chasm

yeah, as a kid it felt like a spooky outlier on the album, almost too real! the terror of limitless possibilities.

This ain't bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0AM2Dons5w

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.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

I think it had something to do with the fact that for the previous several years, arguably the biggest music genre in the country was hard rock, and some of the biggest hits were these vv melodramatic power ballads or tough-sounding midtempo rockers which had a lot of surface appeal but were ultimately pretty shallow once you got past the superficial sweep. And I think probably reflective of people getting a little bored of that shallowness, growing up just a little bit, after years of rock radio being inundated with a lot of dross, the sonic depth and scope of these songs, and the lyrics feeling a lot more immediately lived in, hit pretty hard. I think when this was released it definitely crossed over to various formats and in every single one the singles sounded fresh, tough, and honest. And I think it was marketed really well. I can recall when "I Won't Back Down" was released, it just had this directness and clarity which made it sound so potent, and it had the air of a comeback, like a genuine pro coming in and reasserting themselves in an arena full of fly by night amateurs. And then the hits on that album just kept coming. I can tell you as someone wasn't even old enough to drive at the time, who didn't really seek out Tom Petty's music because I was still in the phase where I was looking forward to the next skid row or guns and roses album, for whom much of what came out of the time in the mainstream just went in one ear and went out the other, as soon as I started hearing these songs, I never forgot them.

great post omar <3

I’ve been revisiting Jason Molina recently and I find this Petty connection in that they both choose this sort of fighting posture to their depression. Molina really explicitly states what Tom sort of just hints at.

That riff is so basic and feels so primal that it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before.

It owes a lot to the piano riff of "Hey Bulldog".

This song (and really this whole album side despite my caveats) is well-done, but my mind tells me "you should be enjoying this" rather than "you are enjoying this".

"it just had this directness and clarity which made it sound so potent, and it had the air of a comeback, like a genuine pro coming in and reasserting themselves in an arena full of fly by night amateurs."

this was also the time of Neil's Freedom and Ragged Glory. i remember those albums seemed refreshing at the time even if they were built on Neil's trusty rusted chassis of the 70s. they just seemed like something that i really needed at that moment. maybe they were just preparing me for the onslaught of grunge to come.

hmm i guess “rockin in the free world” is probably the last classic rock song

good thread idea, that, it's an interesting question

my fave classic rock song from 1989 was probably "sowing the seeds of love".

"sowing the seeds of love" will forever remind me of the dream academy's classic rock cover of john lennon's "love". the "love" cover had whales on it i think. though now that i look the "love" cover came out in 1990. and also featured Junior Vasquez remixes.

Oh yeah! I remember that one.

World Party and XTC too. All that psychedelic stuff.