{"id":47837,"date":"2017-10-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/features\/tom-petty-making-magic\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T07:31:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:31:33","slug":"tom-petty-making-magic","status":"publish","type":"feature","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/features\/tom-petty-making-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Petty: Making Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"tompetty_guitar_225\"<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s a mark of respect, this business of obsessively listening to our musical idols\u2019 songs in the days after they pass, but also a ritual of mourning. We listen to remember\u2014mourning the artist through their creations\u2014but also to remind ourselves of the inescapable march of time\u2014mourning not just the loss of the artist\u2019s voice, but of the years that have brought us, too, that many steps closer to the great beyond.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tom Petty was a dozen years older than me, but the gap never seemed wide, maybe because I have a brother born the same year as TP (1950), but also because his songs always spoke to me in an unassuming yet profound way. Petty\u2019s best songs feel timeless, as if they had always been there waiting and he just happened to possess the proper magic to pluck them from the ether and bring them into the world, lending them weight and dimension.<\/p>\n

And if the songs were timeless, surely he must be, too. Right?<\/p>\n

\"tompetty_st_150\"But no. Tom Petty left us in much the same way he burst onto the music scene 41 years ago\u2014suddenly, with a certain unpredictable flair, an arrow piercing our collective hearts in much the same way the guitar pierces the heart on his supremely talented band\u2019s famous logo.<\/p>\n

Personally, I don\u2019t have much to say about the iconography of Tom Petty. An essential part of his charm is that he seemed thoroughly indifferent to every single one of the frames others tried to place him in: leather-clad proto-punker, pop idol, heartland rocker, music video savant, and eventually, rock and roll royalty. In time he was all of these things, but the only job title he ever seemed to embrace for himself was songwriter. His values all seemed to flow from that core vision of who he wanted to be; the rest was just noise, necessary distractions from the essential craft that captured his imagination from that fateful night in 1964 when four mop-tops from Liverpool, England first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show<\/i>. As biographer Warren Zanes described<\/a> the pivotal moment of his life, to Petty, \u201cThere was something in the Beatles faces\u2019 that looked like freedom.\u201d\"tompetty_bio_300\"<\/p>\n

Petty pursued that feeling for the rest of his life, channeling his energies into the one thing that always made him feel free: writing songs. Songs that could feel simple in their sturdy classicist structures\u2014Petty was a voracious listener to and student of his musical predecessors\u2014but were anything but, full of novelistic details and deftly textured characters, told in an Everyman voice that instinctively knew how to draw an audience into the world he was busy sketching. <\/p>\n

It was a world grounded in subtleties but animated by Petty\u2019s ferociously honest approach to whatever subject he chose to tackle, from the smallest character sketches to the biggest questions life asks. I heard \u201cListen To Her Heart\u201d for the first time when I was 15, and \u201cHere Comes My Girl\u201d for the first time when I was as 17. They helped crystallize ideas about what love is and means that I\u2019ve carried with me ever since: fierce, warm, loyal, urgent, forever. Built from small moments and simple truths, yet at distinct moments, genuinely epic in scale. <\/p>\n

\"tompetty_band_400\"In his art, Petty went straight at those core elements of what it means to be human\u2014highs and lows, love and loss, dreams and schemes\u2014without the slightest pretension of being more than what he was, a headstrong, determined kid from Gainesville, Florida using the only tools he possessed to try to make his way through the world: guitar and pen. That he succeeded so well without losing track of himself is a kind of miracle. Many falter or crumble under the spotlight; Petty simply ignored it and went about his business. He encountered moments of chaos in both personal and professional spheres along the way, yes, but he never allowed the chaos to define him. Tom Petty defined himself, at times seemingly through sheer force of will.<\/p>\n

In the end we\u2019re left with the songs: \u201cBreakdown,\u201d \u201cAmerican Girl,\u201d \u201cI Need to Know,\u201d \u201cEven the Losers,\u201d \u201cThe Waiting,\u201d \u201cFree Fallin\u2019,\u201d \u201cI Won\u2019t Back Down,\u201d \u201cRunnin\u2019 Down a Dream,\u201d \u201cLearning to Fly,\u201d \u201cMary Jane\u2019s Last Dance,\u201d \u201cWildflowers,\u201d \u201cYou Wreck Me,\u201d \u201cRoom at the Top,\u201d \u201cFault Lines\u201d and the list goes on and on and on, a dizzying tally that includes 16 studio albums<\/a> and a pair of bonus-track-studded anthologies. If the moment we\u2019re living through now feels surreal, it\u2019s because it\u2019s so hard\u2014after all these years, all these songs, and all the memories they\u2019ve attached themselves to\u2014to imagine a world without Tom Petty in it.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cMusic is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life,\u201d Petty said in a widely-quoted 2012 interview<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s not some trick involved with it. It\u2019s pure and it\u2019s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things. It\u2019s been so good to me that I want to be good to it. I want to make music that\u2019s worth making.\u201d<\/p>\n

You did. Thanks, TP.<\/p>\n

\"tompetty_1950_300\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s a mark of respect, this business of obsessively listening to our musical idols\u2019 songs in the days after they pass, but also a ritual of mourning. We listen to remember\u2014mourning the artist through their creations\u2014but also to remind ourselves of the inescapable march of time\u2014mourning not just the loss of the artist\u2019s voice, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":49022,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"tags":[],"feature_type":[5606],"class_list":["post-47837","feature","type-feature","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","feature_type-essay"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/feature\/47837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/feature"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/feature"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/feature\/47837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47837"},{"taxonomy":"feature_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/feature_type?post=47837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}