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

The opening couplet gets down to business.

this is maybe my favorite tom petty song. i learned it on guitar around the time my daughter was born and would sing it to her so it took on some greater meaning. the pre-chorus/chorus combo is one of the best ever

Like when that E minor kicks off the pre chorus it feels like the most emo thing petty ever wrote

A good old fashioned fist pumper

nice song. it sort of weirds me out when tom tries to be funny. there's a lightness to it, with those hawaiian guitars and that dum-de-dum drumbeat, but there are also a bunch of minor chords and the humorous tone of the vocals isn't sustained throughout. so it's in this weird funny-not-funny zone. i like his "OI!" before the guitar solo.

He shouldn't try to be clever unless Dylan is in the room to rein him in.

He does just fine here.

That little bent guitar "brreew!" at "dating a singer" and "can't get no lovin'" could be the Lynne-iest touch on the whole album. Overall very pleasant, I like the sound and the call-and-response of the ukulele strumming on the chorus is a nice change of texture.

This is one of the only post-1982 songs I've heard bands cover.

"Yer so bad/best thing I ever had" is one of the few times he sounds coquettish.

I guess I'm swimming against the tide on this one — I hate this song. The lyrics are so boneheadedly simple it's like a children's song. All the rhymes land like dropped bricks. It gives me a headache. I think my hatred of the word "yuppie" makes it impossible for me to even tolerate this song.

This is one of the only post-1982 songs I've heard bands cover.

e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_LZZn7L5c

I love this one, to me it’s the upside of the slightness of the whole album — Petty feeling loose and goofy, letting himself have fun. Would’ve been a B-side on any prior album, probably. I agree about the pre-chorus, just crazy catchy and likable.

this song is a total earworm.

pretty sure there have been other threads, but were there any other 70's rockers who took to video as much as Petty and ZZ Top? he loves the medium, you can tell. I love the sly little smile after "took him for all he was worth".

Rod Stewart.

Elton too.

journey. aerosmith. styx. genesis. oh lots of 70s rockers liked to ham it up in the video years.

Heh, I actually wrote about MTV stalwarts last month.

Lots of '70s rockers adapted to MTV, but I think Petty was unusual in really leveraging it career-wise — MTV palpably made him a bigger star, while for a lot of the older more established acts it was more like an extended lease on existing stardom.

i think it made them all bigger! think of Genesis or Yes. they could have been donesville without MTV. dire straits! i don't think it was just an extended lease. they made so much money and it kinda became who they were! the 70s were dead. nobody was talking about Wind & Wuthering or whatever.

you could say that Peter Gabriel had been helping to invent the 80s with his solo stuff in the 70s and his 80s success makes sense but who would have known that phil collins would end up being one of the biggest stars of the decade? nobody knew that was going to happen. and i feel like MTV was totally the reason for it.

otm

Yeah Phil Collins as we know him is definitely an MTV production. With Yes or Steve Winwood or any number of others, definitely MTV gave them access to an '80s top 40 audience and made them a lot of money. But Petty (and Phil) feel like MTV natives, like you pretty much can't imagine their career trajectories without it.

Depending On You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjVGlKa2rL0

I think 'Depending on You' was one of the songs Petty had in his back pocket when recording started. A wee thing, B-side material.

This is the only time on the album that Lynne's plinky keyboards annoy me.

i rather like the buddy holly-ness of the verses. i also like the descending motif of the chorus. if the chorus itself were stronger this would have made a nice entry on his first or second album.

Yeah the chorus is kind of a nothing.

It's almost a mechanical response (to a well-worn trick), but I love the snare going into double time on the chorus.

this would have made a nice entry on his first or second album.

could explain why I respond to this one.

The Apartment Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR_t-tk1B5U

you are all obviously writing essays about "The Apartment Song"! i look forward to them. you know my motto: if you are going to do Buddy Holly do it in 2 minutes. mission accomplished.

Interestingly the ones he wrote himself are less interesting than the collaborations.

he should have excised the few seconds that have buddy holly air quotes around them.

think i prefer the 84 demo w/ Stevie Nicks — they sound like they're having a blast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKPklG2QVE

Holy shit! It sounds alive. Man, he and Nicks always sound good together, don't they?

they really should've recorded a complete duets album — I kind of love that Nicks takes the low harmony and Petty takes the high here.

The world needed that duet in 1984 way more than it needed the solo version five years later.

otm

I like the FMF version just fine though, not exactly a throwaway more like an interlude

Ok, I'll jump in: I love "The Apartment Song" and relate far too much to its theme of having mostly made peace with your own aloneness through a careful process of not really looking too closely at it or expecting anything different, and then having something from your past float into your head that disturbs that delicate balance for a moment. I think Petty's habit of hanging the mood of his song on a single image that's intuitively but not explicitly linked to it really works beautifully here; he never really returns to that two-room apartment that gives the song its title, yet you get this sense of someone rattling around his too-big home over a long evening.

I like this one, and especially the version with Stevie. That would've sounded good on Southern Accents. otm about the efficiency of the narration, it conveys a lot with very little. It's funny how little there is — two short verses, a chorus, one of the verses again, even with the "Everyday" interpolation it still barely gets to 2 1/2 minutes. It's like a haikiu.

Alright For Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zpU9T937I

Nice.

nice.

somehow these recent ones are totally what they are. commentary doesn't assist.

some nice stuff on the "petty country" album. dolly, willie, and chris stapleton do deep cuts, justin moore does a very good "here comes my girl" vocal, margo price and mike campbell do the lone justice song that petty wrote.

some dude!!!

Depending on You: Fun! Not really much to it, but a good prechorus followed by a good chorus is like, 75% of what a song like this needs. Agreed with Alfred that those little swirly keyboards should have been snipped right now, they soften the chorus up right when the song needs a little more crunch and bottom end.

The Apartment Song: Nice rewrite of "A Thing About You." I for one am in favor of the silly Buddy Holly bit, although I wish it took the song to some new place.... I'm glad it comes back for the outro. Overall this is giving me the good kind of "southwest Florida bar-band playing on beach hotel patio" energy --- good addition to the album.

Alright for Now: I guess the album was overdue for a little bit of chill time after all those relentlessly hammering drum tracks. This is pretty.

sleeve!!!

Omg you guys are still doing this

they won't back down!