Tom Petty

Tom Petty

Featured Album

Essential Albums

  • Wildflowers
    Wildflowers
    Wildflowers

    For an artist who built his career on a certain degree of stubbornness, Wildflowers wasn’t just an admission of vulnerability; it was like standing naked in front of an audience. By the mid-1990s, after two decades of marriage, Petty was heading toward divorce—a personal cataclysm that would fuel much of 1999’s Echo. But you could hear the heartbreak coming on 1994’s Wildflowers, his second solo album, and one that features some of his most somber tunes: The title track finds him pining for a kind of beauty you can’t possess without ruining it, while the heartache in “To Find a Friend” is self-evident. “It’s good to be king/And have your own way,” Petty sings on “It’s Good to Be King”. Sure—but the subtext here is that it’s a kingdom of one. The magic, of course, is that despite the effort and attention that was put into the creation of Wildflowers, the album sounds natural and unforced—a sense of intuitiveness attributed, in part, to the influence of new producer Rick Rubin. Petty was writing from a quieter place now, and finding nuance in his solitude. And he was in a productive state of mind: Rubin said Petty once paused the tape between a demo playback and wrote an entirely new song, end to end, in a few minutes. The Rubin sessions would ultimately yield dozens of songs, and while Petty originally planned to make Wildflowers a double album, Warner Bros. didn’t think it warranted the length (a massive 2020 compilation, Wildflowers & All the Rest, would finally set those tracks free). But even in its original 15-track form, Wildflowers remains one of Petty’s greatest achievements—a surprisingly personal, deeply tuneful collection that finds Petty at his most vulnerable.

  • Full Moon Fever
    Full Moon Fever
    Full Moon Fever

    Whether he was explicit about it or not, you got the sense that Tom Petty always wanted to carry the mantle of the classic-rock artists of the 1960s. So when Bob Dylan adopted the Heartbreakers as his opening act and backing band on a 1986 world tour, the sense wasn’t just of personal and professional validation, but of a historical continuum ensured: Here was one legend giving the nod to the next, seeing to it that rock should—and would—live another season. A year later, on tour in London, Petty got a birthday visit from Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and others just as hurricane-force winds settled onto the coast: A cataclysm, yes, but for Petty, who had lost his home to arson earlier in the year, the biblical signs of a new beginning. A solo album mostly in name and spirit (the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell can be heard throughout, and there are also contributions from Benmont Tench and Howie Epstein), 1989’s Full Moon Fever re-established Petty as an inescapable presence on radio and MTV, thanks to back-to-back-to-back hits “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “Free Fallin’”. But it also gave new angles and fresh paint to a now-familiar sound. When it came to the studio, the Heartbreakers had always been realists, a live band who treated recording equipment as tools to capture, not conjure. Full Moon Fever producer Jeff Lynne—who’d crafted FM magic with Electric Light Orchestra, and who’d help fine-tune Harrison’s sounds for the 1980s—was, by contrast, a stylist: The playing mattered to Lynne, of course, but it was always second to the sound, texture and character of the recording. Nowadays, Full Moon Fever sounds unmistakably like a late-1980s album. But as slick as the record gets at times, its creation (and subsequent multi-platinum success) prevented Petty from treading too close to the rusticism of neo-traditionalism, at a time when it would have been easy for him. Pair it with The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1—his collaborative album with Dylan, Harrison, Lynne and Roy Orbison, and arguably the most enjoyable big-ticket goof in rock history—and you can almost feel the wind of a great hand as it takes the chip off Petty’s shoulder.

  • Hard Promises
    Hard Promises
    Hard Promises

    With 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had finally achieved mainstream success. And on 1981’s Hard Promises, the band members struggled on how to deal with their hard-fought new fame. By the time of the album’s release, Petty had famously gone toe to toe with his record label, opting to file for bankruptcy rather than serve out what he saw as an oppressive contract. But Petty was also butting heads with the music industry as a whole, using his new fame as a platform to rail against a proposed “superstar pricing” tier that would raise the price of a new Heartbreakers album from $8.98 to $9.98—a significant hike at a time when the minimum wage was $3.35. The battles were good publicity, good politics and good fortification for the stories Petty wrote and sang. On Hard Promises, Petty laments the mess his ex got into while saving a little sympathy for himself (“A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)”), lives for the moment, in spite of not knowing what comes next (“The Waiting”) and feels funny about the newfangled outfits the guys are trying to sell him in London (“Kings Road”). If Springsteen fashioned himself as a voice of the people, Petty often just seemed like, well, a person: cranky, jealous, yearning and amused. And as for the Heartbreakers? The band members come off as less jittery than usual on Hard Promises. They’re still fundamentally geared to rock, but they’re also comfortable leaning back a little, as proved by the Dylan-in-the-desert ballad “Something Big”, or the light funk workout “Nightwatchman”—songs that lyrically and musically forsook the bold-faced immediacy of “The Waiting” for something more nuanced and indirect. That doesn’t mean the group’s songwriting was getting obscure—after all, this was still Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. But Petty and the band had gotten comfortable enough to fan out and experiment a little. Before Torpedoes, they’d always known where they were heading; with Hard Promises they started to draw their own map.

Albums

Artist Playlists

Singles & EPs

Appears On

More To Hear

About Tom Petty

When Tom Petty first appeared in 1976, he was an artist out of time and out of place—an outsider in a black leather jacket, a Rickenbacker-armed rock ’n’ roll traditionalist at a moment when that somehow felt radical. If that’s hard to believe, it’s because Petty spent the next several decades writing songs that last. In re-imagining the sounds of his youth—The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, Muddy Waters—he preserved them. And whether he was penning pop hits for Stevie Nicks or exploring roots rock with Mudcrutch, crafting surrealist music videos on his own or teaming up with some of his heroes in The Traveling Wilburys, he was forever unassuming—someone who naturally gave voice to fellow stragglers, strugglers and underdogs. He actually captured it best on 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes, the album that catapulted him to where he belonged, with a now iconic line that, fittingly, is as triumphant at is self-deprecating: “Baby, even the losers, get lucky sometimes.”

HOMETOWN
Gainesville, FL, United States
BORN
20 October 1950
GENRE
Rock

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada
  翻译：