(Credits: Far Out / The Bigger Picture)
Tue 25 November 2025 19:45, UK
There was never any sense in stopping Tom Petty at any point throughout his career.
Even though he would be the first to say that he wasn’t the smartest person in rock and roll, he was willing to fight for what was right even if it meant costing him nearly everything he had. And while that might have been a tough gamble for someone that had been squarely focused on making commercial pop rock, Petty knew that the songs that he wrote were worth protecting at all costs.
As far back as his days in Mudcrutch, his focus was on trying to find the perfect melody to put on top of any chords that were presented to him, and if he didn’t come up with the central guitar riff, he could always find ways of writing around it. Mike Campbell may be responsible for some of the biggest instrumental highlights in his catalogue like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Breakdown’, but it wasn’t going to mean anything until Petty put those lyrics down with the rest of the Heartbreakers.
But before he even had a proper band, the labels were already interested in his songs above anything else. Anyone who wrote a song like ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ when they were barely out of their teens is truly a gifted songwriter, but despite rubbing elbows with George Harrison and working on records with Leon Russell, the life of a solo artist wasn’t for him. Petty wanted a band behind him, and after Mudcrutch fell apart, he knew he needed to bring Benmont Tench and Campbell with him to stardom.
And right when they were about to take over the world, the band came out with their debut and saw…nothing. Every song was great, but there was no real audience for it in the age of punk and new wave. This kind of Byrds-y rock and roll either seemed like a relic of the past or too pretty for the mohawk crowd, but from the first moment that he hit on ‘American Girl’, Petty knew he had something special.
The song itself isn’t exactly the hardest thing in the world to play, but the excitement that the band plays the tune with is still one of the best parts of the final record. The Roger McGuinn worship might seem fairly obvious when listening to the jangle of the guitars throughout the verses, but even up until his final days, Petty felt that nothing got better than playing that tune live.
He already had ‘Free Fallin’, ‘Refugee’, and ‘Here Comes My Girl’ under his belt, but there was an electricity in the air whenever those opening chords started, saying, “Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to play ‘American Girl’ anymore. We’ve been playing it for thirty years. But then maybe you’ll get two hours into the show, and the place is frenzied, and the vibe is so great, and the first couple chords of that song come on, and there’s such a rush of adrenaline throughout the building, that the next thing you know, you’re really digging playing ‘American Girl.’ And I’ll feel, I can’t believe I’m digging this again, but I am.”
But it was never a case of Petty getting nostalgic for his past by any stretch. He was always about forward momentum, and even the year that he died, he seemed to have as much love for tunes like ‘Fault Lines’ from Hypnotic Eye as he did for anything off of Full Moon Fever and half of the Heartbreakers’ 1980s material.
Because looking at his career, Petty was about more than being the traditional face of heartland rock. He wanted to evolve the same way his heroes did, but when you have the pure sound of excitement on a record, it’s going to be impossible to top it when you’re going back into the studio.
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