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Thu 6 August 2026 20:05, UK
The songs that Tom Petty wrote as a 25-year-old man painted a true reflection of who he was for a brief moment in time, not the person he would become.
Back then, it was a simpler time, before he’d been through canon life-events like marriage, fatherhood, divorce, the coalface of addiction, and marriage again, which, naturally, change you as a person. Once you’ve been through these seismic moments, the naivety of youth is hard to recreate when you’re singing a song from a lifetime ago to a packed-out arena in St Louis.
Even though some songs might have a different meaning to every single listener who hears them, it’s different for those who created them. When they hear them, they can often be transported back to the bedroom, a hotel room, or a studio where it was birthed. With Petty, there was one particularly song that was packed with memories of a life that he no longer recognised.
It wasn’t just as a person that he grew, but musically, too. For example, despite Wildflowers being one of his best records, certain songs were never going to translate as well live thanks to the massive amount of overdubs on everything, like the orchestral build on ‘It’s Good to Be King’ or the elastic sense of timing going on in a song like ‘Wake Up Time’, which Petty would still do on occasion. If you told a casual Petty fan that he would sound like that in the 1970s, their heads might have exploded.
Back then, Petty was only getting picked up on college radio and jostling for airtime with the likes of Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello, which meant he had to somewhat preach to the choir rather than experiment.
A song that epitomises early Petty is ‘Breakdown’, which he grew to resent as the years passed. There’s a nervy energy in the 1976 tune that scans much better as a laid-back punk record, especially when the guitars get dirtier in the chorus, and Petty puts a bit more gusto into telling off an old flame that played him for a fool and is bound to knock him on his ass.
It was a relative hit for Petty and his Heartbreakers, becoming his first song to sneak into the Billboard top 40, and was vital in placing him on the map. However, if he had his way, Petty would have liked to have left it in the ’70s.
Further reading: From The Vault
While ‘Breakdown’ was impossible to scribble out of his legacy, the heartland rocker later admitted to having a breakdown of his own regarding his connection to the song, saying in 2004, “‘Breakdown’ I don’t want to play very often. I think because early in our career, we played it so much, I think I relate it to being 25. It doesn’t feel like a song I would sing now. That’s one we don’t play very much. Hardly ever.”
It is undeniably a young man’s song, and would have been somewhat undignified if he released it in his 50s. Nevertheless, having that kind of track in his back catalogue made him stand out amongst the next generation, especially those with punk tendencies who used it as an entry point to his work.
That kind of aggression may not have been something Petty embraced during the final half of his life, but that fire certainly never left him. The lyrics to ‘Breakdown’ may have felt like an unwanted trip down memory lane to a time he’d rather forget, yet as far as embarrassing songs go, Petty had nothing to worry about.
In his later years, it seemed Petty realised this, too. He quietly began to embrace it again, reinstating ‘Breakdown’ into his set in 2005. While he didn’t play it every night, it was fitting that he performed the song that started it all at his final ever concert in 2017 at the Hollywood Bowl, a week before his tragic death.
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