Tom Petty’s been gone for seven years, but he seems as ubiquitous as ever in 2024. The concert film Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party, directed by Cameron Crowe and aired on MTV just once in 1983, was recently released in theaters for the first time. The album that Petty released shortly beforehand, the underrated 1982 gem Long After Dark, has also been reissued with a bounty of studio outtakes. There have also been two high-profile tribute projects this year. Petty Country (A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty) features Nashville stars like Chris Stapleton and Dolly Parton. The soundtrack for the Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey, set in Petty’s home state of Florida, has artists like Eddie Vedder and Weezer covering Petty.
With his long blond hair and high cheekbones, Tom Petty looked like a central-casting rock star. The nasal whine of his voice, propensity to pick fights with the music industry, and loyalty to the Gainesville musicians he came up with made him more of a working-class everyman, though. With an uncanny ability to write 3-minute radio songs with occasional striking moments of lyrical depth, Petty made more hits than misses in the first two decades of his career. Then the Heartbreakers continued being one of the greatest rock bands America has ever produced for a couple more decades, right up until Petty’s death at the age of 66 in 2017.
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Wildflowers, the solo album that Petty himself considered his greatest work, was released 30 years ago this week on November 1, 1994. Where do you rank it in his catalog?
20. The Last DJ with the Heartbreakers (2002)
After two decades as an unusually resilient hitmaker, Petty finally started to fade from rock radio playlists and become a legacy act. It was at this point that Petty wrote a cantankerous concept album about how radio had lost its way, which was far too preachy and self-involved to return his music to the medium he was celebrating and mourning. By the time Petty hollers “My name’s Joe, I’m the CEO!” at the beginning of the fourth song, “Joe,” The Last DJ’s heavy-handed narrative has already worn out its welcome. Petty eventually sings some mellower gems like “Blue Sunday” and “Have Love Will Travel,” but you have to be patient to find the album’s bright spots.
19. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 with the Traveling Wilburys (1990)
In typical Traveling Wilburys fashion, the whimsical supergroup skipped Vol. 2 entirely and named its second album Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, with the members of the group adopting new aliases—Petty, likely in homage to Mudcrutch, became Muddy Wilbury. Roy Orbison, who passed away two months after the release of Vol. 1, is sorely missed on Vol. 3—without his velvety croon, the Wilburys are Bob Dylan and three guys whose singing voices can be described to varying extents as “Dylanesque.” The garage rock opener “She’s My Baby” is a nice shot of adrenaline, and the wry, playful “Cool Dry Place” is one of Petty’s finest Wilburys songs, but Vol. 3 is about as inessential as an album made by Bob Dylan and a Beatle can get. “For all its disposability, this record is loaded with charm,” Greg Kot wrote in the Chicago Tribune review of Vol. 3.
18. Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) with the Heartbreakers (1987)
Dylan and Petty toured together in 1986, with the Heartbreakers backing both singers. The band’s next album led off with a song co-written with Dylan, but “Jammin’ Me,” a goofy topical rant that references Joe Piscopo and Steve Jobs, was an inauspicious first collaboration between two master songwriters. Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is the only album that Petty and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell ever produced without the help of any outside producers, and the garish ’80s polish of “Runaway Trains” and “My Life/Your World” makes a compelling argument for why they never did that again. It’s also the only album they’d made at the time that was left unrepresented on the band’s top-selling release, 1993’s Greatest Hits. When Let Me Up occasionally soars, it’s more on the basis of the band’s performances than the songs themselves, like Campbell’s mandolin and koto textures on the acoustic “It’ll All Work Out” and Benmont Tench’s gorgeous piano on “How Many More Days.”
17. Highway Companion (2006)
Petty’s string of collaborations with Electric Light Orchestra frontman Jeff Lynne in the late ’80s and early ’90s sold over 10 million albums and spun off a dozen rock radio hits. When they reunited 15 years later for Petty’s third solo album, though, they made a subdued road trip record full of songs like “Turn This Car Around” and “Night Driver” with little concern for the singles charts. Petty, Lynne, and Campbell played every instrument on Highway Companion, the only time Petty played all the drums on an album, revealing himself to be a laid-back but sturdy percussionist.
16. Songs and Music from the Motion Picture “She’s the One” with the Heartbreakers (1996)
Ed Burns was briefly Hollywood’s next big thing after the actor-director’s low-budget debut feature, The Brothers McMullen, became a Sundance sensation. Then his first studio film, She’s the One, fizzled out despite the presence of Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, and a soundtrack album by Petty, who was himself coming off of a hot streak. The She’s the One soundtrack is a loose jumble of songs and instrumentals—there are several Wildflowers outtakes, covers of Beck and Lucinda Williams songs, and the jangly single “Walls” appears twice, played at dramatically different tempos. It all sounds great, and “Hope You Never” is a dark, striking breakup song, but She’s the One feels more like a B-sides collection than an album. “There’s fun to be had with the lyrics, particularly when they’re as deadpan funny as ‘California’ and ‘Zero From Outer Space,’” J.D. Considine wrote in the Entertainment Weekly review.
15. Mudcrutch with Mudcrutch (2008)
When Petty, Campbell, and Tench first made the journey from Florida to California in search of rock stardom, Mudcrutch was the name of their band. Mudcrutch released a couple of singles in the ’70s and recorded a lot of demos, some of which eventually became Heartbreakers songs. Three decades later, Petty reconnected with two members that weren’t also Heartbreakers, guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh. The band’s self-titled album is both a debut and a reunion record, mostly comprised of new compositions. It pretty much sounds like a late-period Heartbreakers album, with a little more southern rock flavor and with Petty occasionally ceding vocal duties to the less charismatic other guys. “Scare Easy” and “Orphan of the Storm” are strong songs, but Mudcrutch feels more like a memento of the fact that Petty is a good friend than a cohesive album.
14. 2 with Mudcrutch (2016)
Petty brought his old band together one more time in 2016, a year before his death. 2 is loose and amiable like its predecessor and a little more memorable thanks to songs like the beautiful acoustic track “I Forgive It All.” “Nobody cry for me, ain’t nothin’ to it now / The world will turn somehow,” Petty sings on “Hungry No More,” the closing song from his final album.
13. Southern Accents with the Heartbreakers (1985)
The Heartbreakers finally took their first extended break from the road in the mid-’80s, and Petty set out to make an ambitious double album paying tribute to his Florida upbringing. Southern Accents went off the rails in the studio, though, and Petty broke his left hand after punching a wall in frustration. Multiple producers were brought in to help salvage a single LP album out of the sessions.Dave Stewart of Eurythmics contributed to the album’s biggest hit, the MTV staple “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” but Stewart’s three songs take Southern Accents way off course from its concept album roots. “The Best of Everything,” produced by the Band’s Robbie Robertson and featuring a couple other members of the Band, gets a little closer to Petty’s vision. “The songs have a calculated, secondhand feel,” Joyce Millman wrote in the Rolling Stone review.
12. Mojo with the Heartbreakers (2010)
Perhaps it was the experience of reforming Mudcrutch that influenced Petty to make Mojo, a bluesy jam session of an album. Mojo features a lot of Petty and Campbell trading guitar licks on extended instrumental passages, with the band often doing its best Booker T. & the M.G.’s impression. Songs like “Don’t Pull Me Over,” a reggae tune advocating for the legalization of marijuana, don’t break any new creative ground, but give the Heartbreakers a languid groove to dig into. Mojo is a long and sometimes unfocused album, but at its best, it buzzes with the Heartbreakers’ pure joy of playing together.
11. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 with the Traveling Wilburys (1988)
George Harrison recorded “Handle With Care” with four of his most famous friends for a B-side before it occurred to his label, and his friends, that they had a hit on their hands. The worst supergroups tend to happen when everyone is desperate to stay on top or return to the limelight, but nobody in the Traveling Wilburys had anything left to prove. Vol. 1 is a fun listen because you can tell they enjoyed each other’s company, not because of the jaw-dropping amount of talent and pop music history that was in the room. Petty is, of course, only part of this very accomplished team—his highlights on Vol. 1 include the boozy “Last Night” and the way he says “big refrigerator” on “Dirty World.”
10. Into the Great Wide Open with the Heartbreakers (1991)
After revitalizing his career with Lynne on Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Full Moon Fever, Petty invited Lynne to produce the next Heartbreakers album. That alchemy works best on the classic lead single “Learning to Fly,” a song full of lush Lynne flourishes that still lets Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch cut loose a little. Into the Great Wide Open is full of character sketches and narratives that display Petty’s strengths as a lyricist, but it also has the “Free Fallin’” knockoff “All the Wrong Reasons,” his most naked attempt to rewrite an earlier hit. “Reflective in tone and smooth in texture, the album has the formal beauty and lack of immediacy typical of Lynne’s aerated sound,” Richard Cromelin wrote in the Los Angeles Times review.
9. Hypnotic Eye with the Heartbreakers (2014)
It’s a testament to Petty’s staying power that he finally reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 nearly four decades into his career, with what would turn out to be the last Heartbreakers album. Hypnotic Eye is something of a throwback to the no-frills rock of the band’s ’70s albums, with occasional departures like the jazzy, restrained “Full Grown Boy.” Bassist Ron Blair in particular shines on “Forgotten Man” and the lead single “American Dream Plan B,” and there’s probably no other Heartbreakers album with so many prominent and memorable basslines.
8. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with the Heartbreakers (1976)
“American Girl” and “Breakdown” are as astonishingly great as anything a young band has ever put on its debut album. Outside of those two hits, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sometimes sounds timid and tentative compared to the albums that would follow. Their aesthetic and personality were all there on day one, though, ranging from the swaggering and surly “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)” to the dreamy and ethereal “The Wild One, Forever.”
7. Echo with the Heartbreakers (1999)
Most Petty albums open with songs that are inviting and uptempo. Echo opens with “Room at the Top,” a majestic slow burner that Petty self-deprecatingly called “one of the most depressing songs in rock history.” The last of a trio of ’90s albums produced by Rick Rubin, written during the end of Petty’s first marriage and a private struggle with heroin addiction, Echo retains some of the magic of Wildflowers with its own dark, cathartic beauty. Scott Thurston, a veteran multi-instrumentalist who’d played with everyone from the Stooges to Jackson Browne, started touring with the Heartbreakers in 1989 and began recording with the band on Echo. “This One’s for Me” is one of Petty’s best Byrds homages in a career full of them, and “Swingin’” is perhaps his last stellar single.
6. You’re Gonna Get It! with the Heartbreakers (1978)
The Heartbreakers never quite fit in with punk or even new wave bands. At 29 minutes, though, You’re Gonna Get It! is the band’s shortest and sharpest album, arriving with the right sound at the right time in 1978. A year of touring made the band sound far tighter than they had on their debut, and Denny Cordell’s production is appealingly dry and no-nonsense compared to the slicker blockbusters that would follow. Phil Seymour, whose backing vocals had elevated “American Girl” and “Breakdown,” makes a welcome return appearance on the overlooked midtempo gem “Magnolia.” “Tuneful, straight-ahead rock and roll dominates the disc, and ‘I Need to Know,’ which kicks off side two, is as peachy-tough as power pop gets,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review.
5. Hard Promises with the Heartbreakers (1981)
Petty scored the biggest Hot 100 hit of his career in 1981, but it wasn’t on Hard Promises. In fact, the success of his Stevie Nicks duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” stole the thunder from the Heartbreakers’ “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me),” which became the lowest-charting Petty single in five years. Hard Promises does have a great Nicks collaboration of its own in “Insider,” though, along with classics like “The Waiting” and “Kings Road.” Petty’s first album as an established platinum-selling artist was delayed when he fought with his label’s parent company, MCA, over their “superstar pricing” plan to sell Hard Promises and other high-profile albums for a dollar more than other new releases. Petty didn’t back down and MCA changed their plans, enshrining his reputation as an honorable guy who cared more about his fans than his own bottom line.
4. Full Moon Fever (1989)
Petty and Lynne recorded the album in Campbell’s garage, and MCA chief Irving Azoff initially rejected it as unworthy of release. Then Full Moon Fever became a quintuple platinum smash, spinning off hit after hit including “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and “Free Fallin’.” Most of the Heartbreakers contributed to Petty’s solo debut, but the album is defined by how the California sunshine of Petty’s 12-string guitars is run through the crisp, glossy sound Lynne had perfected with ELO.
3. Long After Dark with the Heartbreakers (1982)
In the ’80s, labels still observed the old music industry model that it was the producer, not the artist, who was the final arbiter of what songs made it onto an album. Jimmy Iovine vetoed one of Petty’s favorite songs recorded for Long After Dark, “Keeping Me Alive,” which remained a major sticking point for Petty for decades after (the song was eventually released as a single from the posthumous 2018 box set An American Treasure). It’s a far better album than Petty ever gave it credit for, though, with the Heartbreakers reenergized by the arrival of new bassist and harmony singer Howie Epstein, and a consistently satisfying set of songs including the frenzied “Finding Out” and the haunting “Straight into Darkness.”
2. Wildflowers (1994)
Like millions of other people, Rubin bought Full Moon Fever and listened to it obsessively. Unlike those other Petty fans, though, the Def Jam co-founder successfully campaigned to produce a Petty album himself. Signing a new contract with Warner Bros. Records allowed Petty a big budget to record with Rubin for two years, creating a relaxed sprawl of an album that captures the full range of his songwriting better than any other album. From rock radio warhorses “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and “You Wreck Me” to the gorgeous folky title track, Wildflowers is the rare ’90s album from a ’70s star that endeared them to a new generation.
1. Damn the Torpedoes with the Heartbreakers (1979)
Before he was the music industry mogul behind Interscope Records and Beats Electronics, Iovine was an ambitious studio hand who was itching to move from engineering for Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon to producing albums. Petty took a chance on Iovine, and it paid immediate dividends: Iovine heard potential in a song that had been kicking around since the Mudcrutch days and nearly given away to the J. Geils Band, and “Don’t Do Me Like That” became the Heartbreakers’ first top 10 entry on the Hot 100. Damn the Torpedoes is one of those irrepressible once-in-a-career albums where every song sounds like a hit and half of them are. Studio perfectionism polished “Refugee” into an unstoppable anthem, while Petty sneered at MCA buying his label on “Century City” and crystallized his defiant underdog appeal on “Even the Losers.”
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