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

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.

otm

Haaaate this song. Mostly because of Jeff Lynne. He's got Petty enunciating (god, I hate how he sings the words "coming down" - it's like he's trying to teach you the song), he's handcuffed the drummer, he's got the ooh-aah backing vocals going again, it's like music for a TV show aimed at four-year-olds. I like music that's beautiful, I like music that's noisy, I like music that's aggressive, I like music that's relaxed to the point of catatonia, but one thing I can't fucking stand is music that's nice. Jeff Lynne makes music with the express goal of making it sound nice. Someone should have fed his hands into a garbage disposal before they ever got near a mixing board.

Kings Highway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h3gXKArWyw

An album track that earned a lot of AOR play, became a concert staple. Campbell as usual is on point.

yeah, the guitars are definitely my fave thing about it for sure.

i like that little ga-lumph on the drums at the very end, as if to say "hey guy's i'm still here!"

guys

One of the stronger tracks on the album imo. A step up from "Kings Road."

another well-written song taken to cheeseville by lynne’s comically washed-out ride cymbals and blocky snares. still like the song tho, with petty’s winsome delivery and campbell’s heroics.

i’ve liked every live version i’ve heard tho, especially this rehearsal version from one of his vh1 specials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnMT-46q3mo

i'm generally a fan of the lynne candy-coated thing, but I do sometimes wish some of these songs had been produced/arranged in a more Wildflowers-style.

have a big soft spot for Into the Great Wide Open, maybe not one of his best but I listened to the shit out of it when it came out. Iconic CD album.

saw them on this tour when I was 12 or 13 — one of my first "real" concerts, great seats (I think my older brother pretty much camped out to get them). completely blew my mind, incredible show.

i wanna hear the heartbreakers when listening to a heartbreakers album. tench’s keys added such warmth to those iovine records that it’s depressing to hear him relegated to those piddly ornamental synth lines. lynch, too, once the swinging backbone, is similarly anonymized, except when he sounds like a sputtering machine.

i didn’t really have these problems with full moon fever, but idk, lynne’s hand is just so heavy on this album

I can hear what y'all are saying, but the songs on this album are for the most part so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFPxn08Jb88

i can see why dylan likes that song, the lyrics have that kind of folk music economy he likes

i love "learning to fly" — such a simple song, not overthought, feels perfect.