(Credits: Songwriters Hall of Fame)
Thu 1 January 2026 19:00, UK
Tom Petty was forever proud to be a disciple of all things rock and roll.
Most people may have been in the business to make as much money as possible, but from the first time he picked up a guitar, Petty always wanted to chase the same high that he had when he first heard people like Elvis Presley perform on television. The music always triumphed over everything else, and he was more than happy to have a few tunes in his back catalogue that have become eternal staples in rock history.
But it would take Petty a while before anyone even realised the kind of magic that he had to work with. His first attempts to get a record deal pretty much sank without a trace, and even when Mudcrutch gained some traction in the early 1970s, it was only a matter of a few years before they were dropped after their album tanked. All he needed was the right band, and once he landed on the Heartbreakers, they at least had a solid foundation to stand on.
After all, ‘American Girl’ had blasted through in England, so despite not being able to get arrested in Los Angeles, the buzz was already starting to grow. If Petty was going to go the distance as a songwriter, though, he realised that he needed someone else with him other than Denny Cordell. The producer helped him get his foot in the door, but that was only a drop in the bucket compared to what Jimmy Iovine could do behind the board.
Iovine already had a reputation for working with other legends like Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon, but his way of getting onto the record was a bit more forceful than usual. He was scheduled to join the sessions as an engineer, but since he brought his own engineer to the studio, he seemed to be right at home in the producer’s chair. Then again, even the sharpest producers of all time were going to be levelled if someone played them a song like ‘Refugee’ for the first time.
For the first and last time in his career, Iovine heard the tune as well as ‘Here Comes My Girl’ and said that the band practically didn’t need anything else. All the drama that anyone could have wanted from a hit was in that song from the first guitar stabs, and while it was a nightmare trying to put the whole thing together, Petty was more than happy to give the song a permanent spot in his setlist until his final days.
‘American Girl’ and ‘Free Fallin’ are probably more well-known songs on the whole, but when listening to ‘Refugee’, Petty felt that no other song gave him that same jolt of energy whenever he performed it, saying, “It’s kind of like our ‘Satisfaction.’ You have to do it, like Ray Charles has to play ‘What’d I Say.’” But it’s not like The Stones could have ever made something that sounded as gritty as what Petty did.
The heartland rocker would be the first to call himself a student of the British invasion, but ‘Refugee’ has a bit more edge to it than the traditional rock and rollers. It wasn’t necessarily punk by any stretch, but given what Petty was singing about, there wasn’t a single soul in his audience who didn’t feel that way at some point in their lives. Every teenager feels like a refugee from something, and even if they aren’t in the same situation that Petty was in, it’s easy for them to put their own spin on whatever those lyrics mean.
And since Petty was in a legal battle against his label throughout the making of the record, ‘Refugee’ was like a self-fulfilling prophecy when it finally hit the airwaves. He had his back against the wall and was barely hanging on throughout the making of that record, but when he finally got his freedom back, every subsequent performance of ‘Refugee’ may as well have been a victory lap.
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