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

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!

lol

A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own

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

Connie Francis!

this is just a fun album. actual fun. not strained or trying too hard. just fun.

The Wilburys Dictum

To be fair, Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) is one of those key transition albums in an artist's career: the end of a method, the start -- tentatively, often awkwardly -- of a new one.

this is too silly for me. i guess i don't like fun.

Zombie Zoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TICZWrb3s2Y

hold your ears, sang freud! more "fun"!

Petty to Rolling Stone in 2017:

Is there any song that you hate?

It’s funny. Sometimes, 10 years later, I like something that I [didn’t like before], or vice versa. But I hate “Zombie Zoo.” I do not understand how that got on the record [1989’s Full Moon Fever], when I had better stuff that didn’t get on the record. What frame of mind produced that, I don’t understand. ‘Cause normally, I would have thrown that away. God knows we’ve thrown away far better. That was nearly a perfect album until the very end.

oh right b-sides, b-right back...

Don't Treat Me Like a Stranger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlhAXQzba-U

okay i think that's actually it. here's a cool 1989 even the losers though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8fvfVPDRoU

I'm surprised he dislikes "Zombie Zoo," another of his delightful reactionary screeds against kids and their funny hair.

i think i'm with tom on this one.

A Mind With a Heart of its Own: great example of the fun-first Wilbury mentality. high-speed Bo Diddley is such a good template. i could take or leave the doot-doot-doot backing vocals (or rather, i wish Bob and George were here to contribute something a little more memorable), but the reverse-echoed whooshes of Lynne chorus are fun. keeping up the momentum. great track in which to find our thread title!

Zombie Zoo: kind of a bummer note to end on, not cause it's a bad song or performance but because the lyric is sooooo "ok boomer." also has a protest-too-much quality, like i can easily believe this guy wishes HE could get down at the Zombie Zoo, but he can't, so he just turns into this creep putting down the "little girls" and so on. zombies just wanna have fun, grandpa! back off!

Petty was the ultimate rockist

often in the best sense

Learning To Fly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5xJN_4Hck

https://i.discogs.com/APgNFRiqFKDPpV4vXolnVpmx10dvFYaF6U148AT8Dp0/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:584/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTkzMDg5/MS0xMTc0MjQ4MDky/LmpwZWc.jpeg

https://i.discogs.com/3Fjkamk_2seQ-3roTAbizRuVc8mOKe21Jt16Jah_ook/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:598/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTkzMDg5/MS0xMjQ0NDQyMDgx/LmpwZWc.jpeg

Very curious about this album - from this point on, I've never heard any of these besides the singles. And if you'd quizzed me a month ago, I might've put Learning to Fly on Full Moon Fever.

Campbells huge solo is the best thing about this one

Petty has referred to this album as a "noble experiment": merge the Heartbreakers + Jeff Lynne. I'm pretty fond of it because it's the first Petty album I bought in real time, the casualness in his singing he learned with the Wilburys works well on the strummier material, and he wrote first-rate album tracks ("You and I Will Meet Again," "Two Gunslingers") we'll get to later.

"Learning to Fly" though? It's just okay, though I know it's one of his classics.

who was talking about depression before? he seems much more concerned with the downside of learning to fly than the upside. nice song though. it feels like a whole entity. dylanesque in its one-note-ness.

i haven’t heard this album in full, only ever heard the singles.

it’s amazing how much older and wearier tom sounds on this song than he ever has

I think the Lynne+Heartbreakers experiment is mostly working here... except for that click-track "just keep the beat" mandate seemingly imposed on Stan Lynch. This is the only one of Lynne's tics that grates on me more and more as I age - most of his style is very comfortable to me, it's what records sounded like when I was a kid. But Lynch here sounds nearly identical to Jim Keltner on the Wilburys album, Phil Jones on Full Moon Fever, and Paul on Flaming Pie - just trucking along keeping the beat. It took the Heartbreakers, like, three albums to get this guy to start playing interesting fills that added something to the songs --- and now it's just been steamrolled back out of him. There are a couple of really great moments, around the solo and the outro, where he somehow slips through Lynne's fingers.

If I can take my ears off of that ingredient, it's a great track and a lovely song. Always makes me think of my best friend and musical goofball partner in college, who would strum the chords going "Learning to Fly, doooo doooo.... Learning to Fly, Doooo, dooo." Must be one of the first things he'd learned on guitar.

Stan (Benmont too) was quite vocal in disliking Lynne's uh disciplinary tactics.

I too only know the singles from this one and don’t care for them. I can’t tell if Jeff Lynn made them worse or if he just made mediocre songs sound weirdly “classic”/“timeless” (not a compliment)

Wonder if they ever played the title track faster, it is really quite slow

the brimstead man said I don't hear a single
The future was wide open

really dislike the clattering drum break towards the end, and those insistent handclaps(?) that recur throughout.

it's the first Petty album I bought in real time

Ha, it was the first one since Hard Promises that I didn’t get when it came out. I hadn’t loved FMF and I thought the singles were drab. Plus I was in college and Public Enemy and De La Soul and Sinead were happening and Tom Petty felt a bit played out to me. I eventually picked up the CD for a buck in a used bin somewhere. It has some good tunes. But also a bit of a placeholder imo.

i will stand up for "Learning To Fly," i think it's the best of Petty's handful of big enduring '90s singles (although some minor singles like "Room at the Top" and "Swingin'" may be better songs). i've never loved "Free Fallin'" as much as many people do, but "Learning To Fly" has a same kind of directness and simplicity that works for me.

i don't think the recurring tok-tok-tok-tok rhythm is handclaps -- i've long wondered exactly what it is, i feel like it's a cowbell or something else metallic. one of my favorite parts of the track, in any event.

thought it was a woodblock

i like "learning to fly" a lot. i like the whole mellow vibe of it. and this is the evolution of tom's voice. gentler. not straining. not doing faux-dylan/mcguinn. this is his grown-ass voice. and i like it.