I think about Tom Petty a lot. But in October, I think about him a little bit more.
This month marks two important Tom Petty milestones— it’s the seventh anniversary of his death (Oct. 2), and the 74th anniversary of his birth (Oct. 20). Like the great Kurt Vile once sang, “Tom Petty’s gone, and I’m long gone, and how am I gonna make amends with myself for never gettin’ to talk to him?” Kurt made amends by writing a song. But I’m not a songwriter, I’m a music critic. So, I listened for the thousandth time to all his studio albums — the solo ones, the ones with The Heartbreakers, with Mudcrutch, the Wilburys, all of it — and wrote this column.
A while back I wrote about Tom Petty songs, but Tom Petty albums might actually be a more interesting topic. Everybody knows the greatness of Tom Petty as a master of the rock-song form. But his albums still fly under the radar a bit.
No more. After all it’s a great big world, with lots of records to run to. And if I have to die tryin’, there’s one little promise I’m gonna keep: I am going to rank Tom Petty albums.
Let’s learn to fly.
20. The Last DJ (2002)
As I was preparing to write this column, I revisited the obituary I wrote immediately after hearing that Tom Petty passed. I hadn’t looked at it since then. What comes across immediately is the overwhelming sense of shock. Petty was 66 and had gone over some bad road. He wasn’t an old man, necessarily, but he was weathered beyond his years. His passing was unexpected, but it was not implausible. And yet I could not wrap my head around it.
My instinct at the time was to focus on how reliable Tom Petty was. It seemed like the obvious, and perhaps only, narrative through-line. His songs were reliably good. They sounded reliably like Tom Petty. And he reliably played them on the road with the Heartbreakers — if not this summer, then the next one or maybe the one after that. And now that was all over. I hate typing something like “this rock star’s death shook me up the most,” but of all the musicians I have loved and then lost in the past 10 years, Tom Petty and David Berman haunt me the most. Berman was younger and his ending was more violent and senseless, and yet it was easier to believe. If you heard Purple Mountains, it wasn’t a shock that this person might not be long for this Earth. But Tom Petty? He was different. He was Tom Petty. He wrote “American Girl” and “The Waiting” and “Free Fallin.’” He was indestructible. I still can’t accept that I won’t see him play those songs at the local arena ever again.
Tom Petty’s death forever changed how I hear his music. When he was alive, I had a quip about a typical Tom Petty record: It’s 30 percent great, 50 percent good, and 20 percent filler. In my book Twilight Of The Gods — written before he died and published seven months after — I offered similarly qualified praise: “Tom Petty could always be counted on to be just good enough. Recording three or four perfect singles and then padding the rest of the album with jangly, expertly performed filler is just good enough. Rhyming ‘some place to go’ with ‘Joe Piscopo’ is just good enough. Tom did not have to prove it all night. He was fine knocking off at around 11 p.m.” My intent was to compliment Tom in comparison to his try-hard heartland rock peer, Bruce Springsteen. But the passage makes me cringe a little now. It’s not as affectionate as I want it to be.
Since his death, I have found myself loving Tom Petty albums I used to only like. I guess this could be classified as “taste inflation via sentimentality,” an easing up of critical faculties in light of an icon’s passing. But I think it has more to do with the principle of supply and demand. When it was possible for a new Tom Petty record to exist, it made a new Tom Petty record seem less precious, given the wealth of pre-existing Tom Petty records in the world. But now that the supply of Tom Petty records is permanently limited, the only way to discover “new” Petty music is to re-investigate the albums you haven’t spent much time with yet. That’s what I’ve done, and it’s made me re-evaluate some of my old opinions. These days, I would describe a typical Tom Petty record as 30 percent classic, 50 percent great, and 20 percent good.
Except The Last DJ. It’s the one Petty record I haven’t yet come around on. A concept LP about music industry greed — at least for the first four songs, which range from okay (the title track) to godawful (“Joe”) — The Last DJ was preceded by two other uncertain records, 1996’s She’s The One and 1999’s Echo. Together they form a mid-life trilogy in which Tom worked through deep feelings of personal dissatisfaction with himself and the world. Divorce, heroin addiction, the death of his father, the horrifying disintegration and eventual passing of his bass player Howie Epstein — it all took something from him in the late nineties and early aughts.
“Unpleasant” is a word you almost never see in the same sentence as “Tom Petty,” but those records are vaguely unpleasant listens. Though I would argue that She’s The One and Echo are fascinatingly unpleasant (and emotionally powerful), whereas The Last DJ just seems embittered and aimless, wavering between self-righteous diatribes and nostalgic glop (save for “Blue Sunday” and “Have Love, Will Travel,” which have little to do with the over-arching concept). I’m sorry, I love you Tom Petty, but a boomer rocker who palled around with Jimmy Iovine does not get to lecture the kids who watched American Idol about how money suddenly became a corrupting influence on music in the early 2000s.
The Last DJ is his “old man yells at cloud” album. It’s not how I prefer to remember him.
19. The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 3 (1990)
This album barely exists. I’m including it here anyway. It’s insane that the largely forgotten Traveling Wilburys sequel came out just 12 years before The Last DJ, because Tom sounds like he’s about 50 years younger. That’s the thing about this life — you go from being the youngest person in the room to the oldest much faster than you could ever imagine.
In the Wilburys, Tom was Muddy, the junior apprentice. The young gun who eased his artistic big brothers back to Top 40 relevancy. Hard to believe now, but back in the day, he was the kid telling you to put your hand on your head, your foot in the air, and to hop around the room in your underwear. Just a fresh-faced 40-year-old baby!
18. Hypnotic Eye (2014)
For the hyper-casual Tom Petty listener, there is only album: 1993’s Greatest Hits, the one with the ugly red cover. The record that is locked and loaded in every dive bar nationwide that still has a CD jukebox. (All hail the dive bars nationwide that still have CD jukeboxes.)
Greatest Hits covers the period, from the mid-seventies to the early nineties, when Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were the most (here’s that world again) reliable radio rock band in America. Historically, only CCR challenges The Heartbreakers for American radio rock brilliance, though Tom spread his songs out over two decades rather than just a few years. After Greatest Hits, Tom entered the Wildflowers era and spun off several more hits. But for the final 20 years of his life, he wandered in the post-radio wilderness. He looked outward for explanations (see The Last DJ), but the proof is in the music. He still wrote good songs, but his talent for crafting perfect singles finally left him. It leaves all the greats eventually, and he frankly held on longer that most. Perhaps it was a failing imagination. Or maybe it was just the weight of an extraordinary — and extraordinarily painful — life. Weariness and melancholy pervade Petty’s post-Greatest Hits career. I didn’t know the man, I only know the music. But the music suggests that he was desperately searching for something to lean on. Listening to the later records, he relies more and more on the strength of his mighty backing band and the sturdy comforts of ancient song forms, like blues and garage-band rock.
There’s a lot of the latter on Hypnotic Eye, his last album with The Heartbreakers. The band lumbers like comeback era George Foreman — what they lack in grace and subtlety they make up with burly force and gregarious spirit. It’s the kind of record you can put on and enjoy for around 50 minutes and then forget about. The exception is “Sins Of My Youth,” a lovely lilt in which Tom once again takes stock of his back pages and attempts to move beyond them. “When the past gets up in your face / Memories slide out of place / All those things that were hidden away / Ain’t so bad in the light of day.” I hope the man himself found solace in those words.
17. Mojo (2010)
The beginning of Mike Campbell’s “dreadlocks” era, one of the more surprising turns in the history of The Heartbreakers. Mike’s explanation was characteristically nonchalant. “I just quit brushing my hair one year and that’s what happened. I like it because it is low maintenance.”
What did his most trusted musical lieutenant changing his approach to follicle care mean for Tom Petty’s musical trajectory? It’s possible that the jam-band moves of Mojo had nothing to do with Mike Campbell’s sudden resemblance to a member of Rusted Root. But these changes moved in harmony nonetheless. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” used to be the modus operandi of Petty and his bandmates. But on Mojo, the band meanders like a stoner in flip-flops searching for sustenance in the snack aisle. This was Petty finally embracing the Allmans side of his Florida musical heritage, though late sixties Grateful Dead is another tangible musical touchstone on the amiable, shaggy-dog acid-blues tracks.
One of the many tantalizing (unrealized) possibilities for Petty’s later career is whether he would have further developed the improvisational feel of songs like “First Flash Of Freedom” and the illusory travelogue “The Trip To Pirate’s Cove,” which plays like a redux of Sideways with weed substituted for wine. Particularly the verse about two buddies who have a fling with a pair of motel maids. “My friend said I don’t like mine / so what do you say we trade / She was a part of my heart / now she’s just a line in my face.”
16. Mudcrutch 2 (2016)
It pains me to write this, but I think it is true: The best music Tom Petty made on record in the final decade of his life wasn’t with The Heartbreakers. It was with his pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch. Which — crucially — also includes the two most important Heartbreakers not named Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. So, yes, Mudcrutch also sounds a lot like The Heartbreakers, only with Tom manning the bass.
But the differences here aren’t just semantic. In the 21st century, the underlying subtext of Tom Petty’s public facing life was interrogating the very idea of “Tom Petty.” This took the form of both celebrating his legacy (via projects like Peter Bogdanovich’s four-hour documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream) as well as downplaying his all-American, arena-rock everyman persona. Reviving Mudcrutch was part of the latter project. It was a way to make a Tom Petty record without the weight of a Tom Petty record, similar to how The Traveling Wilburys had once been an escape hatch for his musical big brothers, Bob Dylan and George Harrison.
This approach had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the Mudcrutch records represent the breeziest music that Petty made in his final years. You can feel the palpable relief in not having to carry the whole load, and instead letting Tom Leadon or Randall Marsh sing an occasional song. It was a chance for Petty to “just” make a record, like he did back in his Gainesville hippie days.
The downside is that most people — even Petty partisans — still don’t really know these albums. Which means they don’t know about “I Forgive It All,” his almost unbearably poignant farewell song. What “Keep Me In Your Heart” is to Warren Zevon, “I Forgive It All” is to Tom Petty. “People are what people make ’em / And that ain’t gonna change / There ain’t nothing you can do / Nothing you could rearrange / But I forgive it all, I forgive it all.”
15. Mudcrutch (2008)
If “I Forgive it All” is the last great Tom Petty ballad, “Scare Easy” from the first Mudcrutch record is the last great Tom Petty rocker. Specifically, it’s a Tom Petty rocker in his old school “surly but sensitive” mode, the gear in which he makes a show of being a tough guy who can’t completely hide his soft romantic underbelly. I refer to one-part “I love you” and one-part “fuck you” classics like “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It),” “I Need To Know,” “You Got Lucky,” and the apotheosis of this Petty genre, “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”
In “Scare Easy,” Petty opens with an excellent “surly but sensitive” Tom Petty lyric: “My love’s an ocean / you better not cross it.” Part threat and part admission of vulnerability, it sets the stage perfectly. And then Tom lets Campbell and Tench do their Campbell and Tench things — Campbell provides the requisite stinging guitar solo in the middle of the song, and Tench lays down his trademark glowering Hammond organ fills. It’s all exquisitely executed and feels as natural as inhaling and exhaling.
This is what it means to make professional rock music at the highest level. You better not cross it.
14. The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 (1988)
Criticizing this album is like making fun of your grandpa on his deathbed. So, I’ll say, with genuine affection, that the first and last songs are classics, and the eight in the middle are mostly trash. But who cares about songs when you get to hang out with five of the coolest guys who ever lived?
Dylan and Petty best understood the assignment. Their songs are self-consciously tossed off, in a very charming manner. Bob’s most important contribution, the Springsteen homage/parody/tribute/troll “Tweeter And The Monkey Man,” is one of his funniest (and dumbest) compositions, while the Petty-led “Last Night” plays like a meandering “Knock Knock” joke without a punchline.
If you don’t like this album, then you probably get annoyed whenever an old guy asks you to pull his finger. The rest of us meanwhile can appreciate the hilarity of the situation.
13. Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) (1987)
Tom Petty crashed and burned twice in his career. The first time — when his house literally burned down in the late eighties just as The Heartbreakers were hitting a brick wall — he was able to recover and come back better than ever.
The two records that precede that mini-apocalypse are among the ones I’ve spent the most time with in recent years. They are the most prescient albums he made in the eighties, in terms of predicting what “heartland rock” would sound like during the post-Lost In The Dream era. On Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), Petty attempts to meld his usual meat-and-potatoes rock with synths in a manner that was already starting to sound dated in 1987, hence his turn toward the retro hominess of Full Moon Fever. But in 2024, songs like “Runaway Trains” and “My Life/Your World” actually sound pretty contemporary, like they could have been made by a jean-jacketed indie band from Philadelphia signed to Lame-O Records.
And then there’s “Jammin’ Me,” a co-write with his future Traveling Wilburys homie Bob Dylan, who borrowed The Heartbreakers for a world tour around this time and proceeded to run them into the ground. I’ve always adored “Jammin’ Me,” and I really love the thought of Tom and Bob writing it in 15 minutes and laughing their asses off.
12. Southern Accents (1985)
The first part of Tom Petty’s mid-eighties “confusion” period. Southern Accents is praised — sometimes overpraised — by Petty heads as a bungled quasi-masterpiece, a would-be concept record about southern identity that would have beat Southern Rock Opera to the punch by 15 years had Petty not been distracted by cocaine and Dave Stewart. As it is, there is just enough of the original idea to confuse anyone who doesn’t know the backstory. The rousing “Rebels,” for instance, might have more fully registered as an ironic Randy Newman-style story song had it been surrounded by similar numbers like “Trailer” and “Walkin’ From The Fire” that Petty chose to leave off the record. (Performing “Rebels” on stage with a Confederate flag draped behind him, another ironic gesture Petty later apologized for, didn’t clarify matters.) These mistakes are compounded by the lame country-funk numbers made with Stewart that did make the album. We can only assume that “Make It Better (Forget About Me)” sounds amazing if you’re doing lines in an L.A. studio at three in the morning.
The record Southern Accents might have been seems a lot better than the record that Southern Accents actually is. But the record that Southern Accents actually is still delivers some of Petty’s finest songs of the eighties. I refer, of course, to the most successful Dave Stewart collaboration, “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” as well as the epic title track, one of Petty’s all-time best compositions with probably his single greatest bridge. Johnny Cash later covered it, which tells you something about how weighty “Southern Accents” is. But I wish Levon Helm would have also taken a crack at it. “Southern Accents” has the same mix of regional pride and naked hurt that “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” has, without the problematic affiliations.
11. Long After Dark (1982)
Earlier I mentioned the “taste inflation via sentimentality” that I’ve experienced with Tom Petty records. This obviously does not apply only to me. For instance, The Wallflowers are currently on tour and performing their most popular album, 1996’s Bringing Down The Horse, in its entirety. This is exactly what you would expect The Wallflowers to be doing in 2024. But in addition to Bringing Down The Horse, they are also playing the fifth Tom Petty album, Long After Dark, from front to back. Now, that is surprising. Of course, Jakob Dylan is a famous Petty acolyte. He inducted the man and his band into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. But why Long After Dark? If you’re doing early Petty, Damn The Torpedoes or even Hard Promises makes more sense. Before Petty’s death, Long After Dark was a record remembered only by die-hards. Its one hit, “You Got Lucky,” is dominated by Benmont Tench’s polarizing synth tone, a quintessential eighties corporate rock sound that would never recur on a Heartbreakers record. It’s just not an album that you would expect anyone to pull out for a tribute show. It’s really good, but not emblematic. It would be like paying homage to Springsteen by busting out Devils And Dust.
Of course, I am a Petty diehard, so I fully support the Long After Dark love. Especially since this is among the albums I played the most after he died, precisely because it doesn’t have a lot of hits. Now, in the annals of Petty fandom, “Change Of Heart” and “Straight Into Darkness” feel like hits, even though more casual listeners probably won’t recognize them. And “You Got Lucky” is one of his best and most underrated radio songs, synth haters be damned. (Also shoutout to the video, Petty’s finest MTV moment of the eighties. And, no, I haven’t forgotten “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Tom and the Heartbreakers doing Mad Max > Tom and the Heartbreakers doing Alice In Wonderland.)
But the majority of this record is just The Heartbreakers … what’s a nice word for “coasting”? Long After Dark is the Petty album I originally described as “30 percent great, 50 percent good, and 20 percent filler.” But the band sounds so goddamn good that it scarcely matters. And now, in the post-Petty times, I can’t get enough of early eighties Heartbreakers tearing through a meaty mid-tempo rocker. The inflation is real.
INTERMISSION
October might as well be known as Long After Dark month in Tom Petty circles — the album was just reissued with a bonus disc of outtakes, and then there’s Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party, a long-lost documentary originally put together by Cameron Crowe for MTV in 1983. But the music channel buried it back then, airing Crowe’s free-wheeling, fly-on-the-wheel document of the Long After Dark tour just once in the middle of the night at 2 a.m.
Viewed more than 40 years later, Heartbreakers Beach Party — which screened briefly in theaters across two days last week, and will presumably be available on video soon — makes a convincing case for Long After Dark being an important transitional point. Petty was the rare seventies rocker who recognized the burgeoning power of MTV, and no matter his misgivings, he was more willing than most to play ball. Well into the nineties, he consistently outclassed his peers in terms of making videos that were memorable and compatible with whatever the current musical flavor of the month happened to be.
But the purest pleasures of Heartbreakers Beach Party come from the excellent concert footage as well as the intimate hangs on the band’s tour bus, where the guys lounge, smoke, laugh, and make up songs like Lost Boys on one of their final adventures. In those moments, playing in a rock band seems like the best job in the world. For the Heartbreakers, it actually was.
Back to the list.
10. Highway Companion (2005)
Let’s take a moment to talk about an under-discussed paradox in Tom Petty’s career. In 1991, he released Into The Great Wide Open, and it was credited to Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. But by all accounts, The Heartbreakers did not function as a band in the studio. The musicians were called in, one by one, and told to robotically punch in their parts, in accordance with the meticulous production methods of co-producer Jeff Lynne.
The next Tom Petty record was 1994’s Wildflowers. It was credited solely to Tom Petty. But in the studio — partly as a reaction to the stifling conditions deployed on the previous release — The Heartbreakers played together as a band. Therefore, the “solo” record was more of a band record than the album actually credited to the band.
I don’t understand this. If Tom Petty were alive today, it wouldn’t be the first thing I would ask about. But it would make the top 10.
Anyway: Highway Companion is a true Tom Petty solo record. He wrote all the songs by himself, and he plays most of the instruments. If you have ever wondered what Tom Petty’s drumming sounds like, this is the record for you. The only other musicians are Petty’s two most important songwriting collaborators, Mike Campbell and Jeff Lynne. Here they form a creative polycule for the last time, and it’s a fine send-off. This is the closest Petty came to making a top-to-bottom great record in the 21st century. Not all the songs are winners — “Ankle Deep” probably doesn’t need to be here — but the peaks represent his finest work as a writer in the final act of his career. I refer specifically to “Down South,” a witty and wistful road trip song in which Tom pledges to “create myself down south / impress all the women / pretend I’m Samuel Clemens / wear seersucker and white linens.”
Sometimes, when I fantasize that Tom Petty really is alive today and merely faked his own death seven years ago, I like to think he followed through on that lyric.
9. She’s The One (1996)
Petty has described this as a not a “real” Tom Petty record. And I suspect most people who aren’t Tom Petty feel the same way. That’s because it was presented as the soundtrack to an Ed Burns rom-com that didn’t come out until six months after the record was released. To be honest, I’m not sure the Ed Burns film even exists, as I have never met anyone who has seen it nor have I ever seen it discussed or even referenced in any forum. Actually, do any Ed Burns films exist at this point? No semi-acclaimed nineties auteur has been wiped off the face of the planet so completely. I’m pretty sure that if you watch Saving Private Ryan now, Ryan Reynolds’ face is CGI’ed over Ed’s.
But I digress: I didn’t realize any of this at the time that Tom Petty’s She’s The One was released. I bought it the day it came out, and I loved it immediately. I loved the first track, “Walls,” which I recall being sort of an MTV hit right before MTV became the “Teen Pop vs. Nu Metal” channel. I actually still love “Walls” — it’s Tom’s last big pop moment, and it includes some truly epic backing vocals from his best friend and Stevie Nicks’ ex, Lindsey Buckingham. There are also some excellent covers of songs by Lucinda Williams (“Change The Locks”) and Beck (“Asshole”).
(This same year, Tom and The Heartbreakers also played on Johnny Cash’s cover of “Rowboat.” 1996 was huge for the One Foot In The Grave hive.)
She’s The One is now regarded, if at all, as an afterthought to Wildflowers. These songs derive from the same fertile songwriting period, and they tend to get dismissed as leftovers. (The fact that She’s The One bombed in the wake of a widely loved predecessor didn’t help matters.) Anyway, I dispute that categorization. She’s The One to me is a more overt reflection of Petty’s despair over his failing marriage. The songs are more bitter (“Hope You Never”) and harder rocking (“Supernatural Radio”), and generally more personal than the soundtrack trappings might suggest. And then there’s the two versions of “Angel Dream,” a love song so tender and heartfelt that it could justify 27 more renditions.
8. Echo (1999)
Earlier I used the word “unpleasant” to describe this record. That’s not a criticism. This is the eighth best Tom Petty record. Echo is pretty great. But it’s a painful listen. Most of these albums you can put on at a barbecue and have a good time. Not Echo. This is a record you play when it feels like there’s a barbecue raging in the pit of your soul. Mike Campbell says he never puts it on. I doubt an.yone directly involved in the making of Echo puts it on. It’s the “dark night of the soul” record.
The opening track “Room At The Top” has become a popular Petty standard in the years after his death. Eddie Vedder played it at the Oscars as a Petty tribute, and Jason Isbell covers it on his new live album. I get why this happened — “Room At The Top” is a great Tom Petty song that hasn’t been played to death on classic rock radio like all the other great Tom Petty songs. It feels fresh, almost like a “new” Tom Petty song.
But it’s still strange to me when people use “Room At The Top” to pay homage to Tom Petty. It’s like using “Mother” to pay tribute to John Lennon, or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” to salute Kurt Cobain. Amazing songs, yes, but these are heavy-duty emotional haymakers. “Room At The Top” is the single bleakest track in Petty’s canon. It evokes extreme loneliness, devastating addiction, and romantic hopelessness. The part where he sings “I love you, please love me, I’m not so bad” is almost too much for me to take.
Painful. So, so painful. Great. But painful.
7. You’re Gonna Get It! (1978)
The exclamation point is earned. This is Petty’s Room On Fire, the album where he repeats the sound and formula of the debut, only his band is even hotter and gnarlier after rocking on the road for a few years. It’s really the sound of The Heartbreakers that really puts this album over — they were young and hungry and angry and loaded to the gills with well-earned swag. You hear it immediately on the first track, “When The Time Comes,” which whips by so fast that it beats time at its own game. Their later records might have better songs, but they don’t swing quite as hard as The Heartbreakers do here.
Speaking of songs: Can I interest you in a little number called “Listen To Her Heart”? It’s only one of the greatest rock tunes ever recorded. How about “I Need To Know”? That’s also one of the greatest rock tunes ever recorded. Elsewhere, “Hurt” previews Petty’s Allmans-esque era 30 years in advance, “Restless” features a truly excellent and titanic Stan Lynch backbeat, and “No Second Thoughts” just rips your heart out.
If you need a Petty record to put on at quitting time on a Friday, this is the one you want.
6. Hard Promises (1981)
It opens with “The Waiting,” which tells you something about how courageous Tom Petty was. He started with “The Waiting,” his most perfect song, and then he was like, “I’m going to put nine more songs after this one.” I actually love the second track “A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)” almost as much as “The Waiting,” maybe because the guitar riff kind of sounds like a sadder version of “The Waiting.” And then there’s “Something Big,” a crime novella set to a melody that I’m convinced was subsequently ripped off by Mike Post for the Law & Order theme song.
Tom screwed up when he fumbled “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the Stevie Nicks duet that became the biggest Heartbreakers hit of 1981 and buoyed the sales of Nicks’ debut LP, Bella Donna. But the Stevie ballad that made it on Hard Promises, “Insider,” probably seemed like a more obvious single when they recorded it. “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” is a bluesy vamp with a dark, angry edge — in the video, Stevie gives Tom the “Silver Springs” stare down when he sings his verses. The vibes are heavy in a way that don’t seem compatible with pop music. Except they were, because these rock icons were at the peak of their musical powers and sexual charisma.
About the album cover: Apparently Tom Petty hated it? He told Spin in 1989 that it was “boring” and that “I still cringe when I see Hard Promises.” This is bad enough, but then Rolling Stone used this quote as an excuse to call it one of the worst covers ever.
Am I the crazy one here? Because I love the cover of Hard Promises! I honestly think it’s one of the three or four best covers of his career. Full Moon Fever, the self-titled, Damn The Torpedoes — I think you slot Hard Promises right with those ones.
“Since then, I’ve always been real particular about the album covers,” he claimed in the Spin interview. Really, dude? You think Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is better than Hard Promises? Give me Tom shopping for records any day.
5. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers (1976)
Tom was a little less audacious on the debut. He put the perfect rock song last this time. What can be said about “American Girl” at this point that hasn’t also be said about the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, apple pie or your mother? Actually, I’ll take Mike Campbell’s outro guitar solo — his first classic outro guitar solo in a career loaded with them — over any of those other institutions. (No disrespect to your mother.) The debut’s other deathless standard is “Breakdown,” the original “surly but sensitive” Tom Petty classic and an early taste of Benmont Tench’s impeccable knack for a smokey, evocative keyboard lick.
And then there’s “The Wild One, Forever,” one of the great deep cuts in the Petty catalog, in which Stan Lynch provides peerless backing vocals along with his usual powerhouse beat. A decade and a half after this album came out, Stan was kicked out of the band, as his loudmouth ways finally rankled the boss beyond reconciliation. But the way he harmonizes with Petty on this song has always seemed like the purest musical manifestation of the brotherhood that was The Heartbreakers. I’ll never get over how good it felt.
4. Damn The Torpedoes (1979)
Jimmy Iovine became a permanent entry on my enemies list for way he treated my man Stan during the making of this record. He even briefly convinced Petty to replace Stan during the making of Torpedoes. Stan eventually came back to the fold, but Iovine has continued to slag the man’s drumming in various books and documentaries over the years. Which I absolutely do not get, both because of Lynch’s overall legacy with The Heartbreakers and his (obviously?) killer playing on this specific record. Have you heard the backbeat on “Here Comes My Girl”? How about the oomph that Stan gives to “Refugee,” yet another perfect rock song that Petty put at the start of an album? And let’s not forget Stan’s stellar backing vocal on the chorus. He brought multiple tools to the table.
If I were ranking these albums based solely on their Side 1’s, Damn The Torpedoes would probably be number one. The first three songs — “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” and “Even The Losers” — can go toe-to-toe with the start of any album. I do think the record drops off a bit in the home stretch, though “Louisiana Rain” is one of the great Petty album closers.
3. Into The Great Wide Open (1991)
Generational bias alert: My top three Tom Petty albums correspond with my early teen years. Now, I really do believe these are his best records. But I also concede that my top three Petty LPs might have been Damn The Torpedoes, Hard Promises, and Long After Dark if I were 10 years older.
Having said that: Tom Petty was rock’s cool uncle from 1989 to 1994. With Neil Young, he was the most relevant boomer era singer-songwriter. He was an elder and a role model, but he was also part of the mainstream music world. This might sound strange, but Tom Petty at that time sort of occupied the same spot that Beyoncé does now — his legacy was already secure, but it was commonly accepted that he was making the best music of his life as he entered his 40s. (Tom was the original Cowboy Carter!)
Into The Great Wide Open is the middle record of this run. It has a somewhat checkered reputation for two reasons, both of which are unfair. The first is that it wasn’t quite as good and didn’t do as well commercially as the predecessor, Full Moon Fever, Petty’s first collaboration with Jeff Lynne. Now, if we’re going to punish albums for not being as good as Full Moon Fever, we might as well delete practically every record ever made. So, toss that one out.
The second reason is that The Heartbreakers themselves, most notably Benmont Tench, have talked about the tedium of making Into The Great Wide Open. The sessions weren’t a great hang, apparently. Lynne’s exacting methods didn’t jibe with the band’s usual way of doing things. But as Petty retorted in Runnin’ Down A Dream, nobody cares how a record is made. They only care if they like it. And I love Into The Great Wide Open.
2. Full Moon Fever (1989)
Jeff Lynne still is a polarizing figure in Petty world. The albums they made together were hit machines, but in retrospect the heavy-handed production has alienated those who prefer the more naturalistic sounds of practically every other Petty record.
I happen to really like Lynne’s production, but I get the complaints. I wouldn’t want every Tom Petty record to sound like Into The Great Wide Open or even the relatively restrained Full Moon Fever. But here’s what can’t be disputed about Lynne: Petty wrote many of his most famous tunes with him.
This will sound like a bold claim but I can back it up: For a few years there, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne were the Lennon/McCartney of their era. Just look at the songs they wrote together. From Into The Great Wide Open, you have “Learning To Fly,” “Into The Great Wide Open,” “All The Wrong Reasons” and “Out In The Cold.” And from Full Moon Fever, there’s “Free Fallin’,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “A Face In The Crowd,” “Runnin’ Down A Dream” (with Mike Campbell), and “Yer So Bad.” (There’s also Roy Orbison’s last hit, “You Got It,” another co-write with Campbell.)
Listening to those tracks, you can make educated guesses about who did what — Petty definitely wrote the witty/wistful lyrics and possibly the vocal melodies, and Lynne likely composed the lushly poppy music. But no matter how it broke down, their brief partnership was stunningly productive when it came to producing timeless rock songs.
1. Wildflowers (1994)
For years, Full Moon Fever was my no-brainer choice for best Tom Petty album. It was the no-brainer choice for most people. But over the years, it feels like Wildflowers has slowly but surely become the go-to Petty record for most people, myself included. It speaks to the album’s influence — however one wants to define whatever “Americana” is supposed to be, it feels like “musically similar to Wildflowers” is probably the most accurate definition. Anyone who plays vaguely twangy, guitar-based singer-songwriter music in 2024, consciously or not, is in some way emulating this record. (I would say the same about Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, but Lucinda was probably cribbing from Wildflowers, too.)
I used to differentiate Wildflowers from Full Moon Fever by distinguishing Full Moon Fever as the “songs” record and Wildflowers as the “vibes” record. I still think that’s broadly true. Full Moon Fever is loaded with the Tom Petty songs that will be played at CVS stores for as long as there are CVS stores. And Wildflowers is one of the all-time “hangout” records. But Full Moon Fever is also a great hangout record — you’re in the garage with Tom and Jeff and about a million acoustic guitars! And Wildflowers has tons and tons of wonderful songs. It has the Tom Petty song for me, the title track, the one he supposedly improvised in the studio as Benmont Tench played the prettiest piano arpeggios of his damn life. The musical balm Petty sang to himself when he yearned to be somewhere he could feel free. It took him a while, but he got there.
Wildflowers has songs. And Full Moon Fever has songs. But Wildflowers has a few more songs, so I guess that makes it number one.