Credit: Far Out / Album Cover / Elvis Presley
Wed 19 August 2026 2:00, UK
Despite not being part of the initial wave of rock and roll stars to emerge during the 1950s and ‘60s, Tom Petty is indisputably indebted to the style that was populated by this gamut of pioneering artists like Elvis Presley.
His style was always geared towards emulating the roots of the genre, and while he was astute enough to avoid his work ever becoming something that could be considered a direct rip-off, what he did was inject a touch of modernity into the genre and bring things up to date. From the moment his band’s self-titled debut album, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, emerged in 1976, it was clear that a new hero of rock and roll had been born and thrust into the consciousness of listeners who were eager for a new star to worship.
Of course, during the initial wave that predates Petty’s arrival, one of the standout stars was a certain Elvis Presley, a man who undoubtedly shaped the artistry of an entire generation’s worth of future rock and roll icons with his incredible confidence and unique approach to performing. He soundtracked the childhood of many artists who ended up emerging towards the end of the 1960s and into the ’70s, and Petty, for one, was no exception.
By the 1960s, Presley was not only beginning to slow down with the amount of music he was releasing, but he also began to shift away from the rock and roll style he was known for, and began experimenting with a greater palette of sounds.
It would have been Presley’s 1960s output that Petty was exposed to the most during his most impressionable years, and during a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, he picked out the three Elvis songs from the ‘60s that most influenced his own work as a solo artist and with his band.
His first nomination, ‘A Mess of Blues’, was originally released in 1960 when Petty was just ten years old, and while it doesn’t stray too far away from the bluesy rock and roll he had been peddling in the 1950s, it was a reminder that despite having been enlisted in the forces at the end of the ‘50s, he hadn’t lost any of his spark during his absence. “The lyrics are sad”, Petty stated, “But he sounds triumphant.”
Delving into a slightly more country-adjacent song from the following year, Petty also cites ‘(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame’ as being another Presley song that completely lit up his infatuation with the singer and inspired him to think about how instruments can be used together. “The whole thing jumps out of the speaker,” Petty claims in his appraisal of the song.
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“I used to have a tape of alternate takes. It was kind of a mess when they started, and it turned into this beautiful arrangement.”
However, his final selection is perhaps not only the most famous, but also the most stylistically different pick of the three when compared to Presley’s usual fare. “When it came on the radio, it’d make you swoon every time,” Petty said of his 1961 classic, ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’. “I prefer Elvis before he went into the Army in ’58, but he did come back and do a few great things. It wasn’t all over.”
Elvis Presley influenced an entire generation, but for Petty, studying ‘The King’ ultimately led him to become the star that he was, consequently keeping rock and roll alive into the latter parts of the 20th century.
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