Day Two in the Tom Petty retrospective brings us to the 1978 album You’re Gonna Get It.
By all accounts, this album was a continuation of the band’s debut, adding little to the mix but effectively carrying the torch of harmonic garage rock that Petty and the Heartbreakers had introduced a couple of years earlier.
I’m not a big enough fan of Tom Petty. I own seven of his solo and Heartbreakers albums, plus two he recorded with other bands, but somehow that doesn’t feel like enough.
He has released eight albums that I don’t own. I’m familiar with his early work mostly through the hits, and no doubt those records contain lots of material just as worthy as the radio staples I love.
I wouldn’t dream of owning a handful of Elvis Costello albums and just the “hits” from the rest (in whatever sense Costello has actually had hits). I’m not equating Tom Petty with Elvis Costello, but they aren’t so far apart that the analogy is baseless.
Best Songs of 2010 – #10
OK, with the honorable mentions out of the way I now move on to my official top ten songs of 2010. I’ll count down ten through six this week and five through one next week, with an Elvis Costello weekend in between.
This list usually proves controversial so I’ll lay down the ground rules up front in hopes of preventing complaints down the road.
This is not a list of the best singles of the year… many of these songs were never released apart from the albums that contain them. This is not a list of songs that made a huge impact on radio or captured the cultural zeitgeist in 2010… I featured many of those tracks during my summer song series and that will have to do.
Some artists bounce back and forth between solo albums and albums with “the band,” and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You can usually, but not always, tell when Bruce Springsteen is on his own or backed with the E-Street Band. Elvis Costello’s albums sound pretty much the same whether or not he credits The Attractions (or The Impostors) or headlines his albums himself.
Tom Petty with or without The Heartbreakers has always struck me as pretty much the same thing. Quick, Into the Great Wide Open… solo or Heartbreakers? Southern Accents? Full Moon Fever? Highway Companion? Wildflowers? The first two were Heartbreakers albums, the rest solo. But the style on all of them is pretty much interchangeable (not least because Petty tends to use the same musicians even when he goes “solo”).
After choosing ‘American Boy’ yesterday, I couldn’t resist the symmetrical pick of ‘American Girl’ today. And this can also serve as another exhibit in the gallery of ugly male singers.
I often joke with my wife about Tom Petty. She will instinctively say that she dislikes him intensely, yet every time a Tom Petty song comes on the radio she’s thrilled and insists that this is the one Tom Petty song she really likes. Of course she has said that about at least five different songs by now. In my book, once you love five songs by an artist, you kind of have to call yourself a fan. Sorry, Alex!
Meet Me In Montauk 