(Credits: Far Out / Tom Petty)
Fri 24 April 2026 20:26, UK
Following the release of 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes, Tom Petty truly came into his own as both a songwriter and a public figure.
While his fans and bandmates had always recognised his unique calibre, this landmark record solidified his reputation, blending nostalgic heartland sounds with gritty rock in a way that captivated audiences. By the end of the ensuing decade, Petty had cemented his status as a bona fide legend.
Although Damn the Torpedoes ranks among the very best Petty records, with it finding the songwriter at the beginning of the process to stadium-filling refinement he became world-famous for, meaning it still contained the punky rawness that allowed him to burst onto the scene amid a musical environment that was changing, he worked quickly to capitalise on its gains.
In May 1981, Petty and the Heartbreakers released their fourth album, Hard Promises. It emerged during a period when he was starting to find his feet as a folk hero. His route to this position was partly thanks to him delaying the release of the record as he very publicly kicked back against the distributor, MCA Records, and their decision to put the album’s price up by a dollar to the “superstar pricing” of $9.98, which they’d already done with Steely Dan’s Gaucho and ELO and Olivia Newton John’s Xanadu soundtrack.
While this was an era where music was changing, and a corporate mindset was taking over, with MTV founded in August 1981, Petty wasn’t having it. This resulted in a groundswell of support from the public, who celebrated his moralistic position, and while done for nothing but authentic reasons, it served as a brilliant PR move.
(Credits: Far Out / The Bigger Picture)
What that moment revealed more than anything was Petty’s instinct for protecting the relationship between artist and audience. He had always positioned himself as someone who stood alongside his listeners rather than above them, and the pricing dispute only reinforced that image. It was not about grandstanding, but about maintaining a sense of fairness in an industry that was beginning to drift in a different direction.
There was also a growing confidence in how he navigated his career at this point. Having already proven himself with Damn the Torpedoes, Petty no longer felt the need to compromise on decisions that did not sit right with him. That assurance filtered into his work, giving the songs on Hard Promises a steadiness that complemented their emotional pull and helped solidify his standing as a figure people could both admire and trust.
This willful, countercultural spirit, when matched with the album’s contents, only stood Petty in even greater stead for the future. With the record containing highly resonant classics such as ‘A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me)’ and ‘The Waiting’, Petty drove himself deeper into the public’s hearts.
‘The Waiting’ was a particularly significant track for Petty’s rise as a cultural legend. Featuring the central line, “The waiting is the hardest part,” it was a masterclass in writing about something so specific while leaving the meaning vague enough for people to attach their own meaning to it—a tact he was a master at. It could have been related to romance, or as The Simpsons would parody it later on, to something as trivial as Homer waiting to be able to use his new gun.
Indicating his lifelong connection to the rock music of the 1960s and the counterculture that he developed his ethos in, Petty would say on many occasions that the song was inspired by a line from the late Janis Joplin, who said: “I love being onstage, it’s just the waiting.” He also noted that Roger McGuinn of The Byrds maintained that he said it to him, but he wasn’t sure that was right.
Ironically, Petty had to endure a wait while writing the song, feeding into its tangible essence. He just couldn’t get it right and once revealed that the writing process “went on for weeks” and was “a really hard time.”
In one interview, he explained: “That was a hard one. Went on for weeks. I got the chorus right away. And I had that guitar riff, that really good lick. Couldn’t get anything else. (Softly) I had a really hard time. And I knew it was good, and it just went on endlessly. It was one of those where I really worked on it until I was too tired to go any longer. And I’d get right up and start again and spend the whole day to the point where other people in the house would complain. ‘You’ve been playing that lick for hours.’ Very hard.”
Petty was sure that the song never lost potency over the years because it was adaptable to a variety of situations. Given that he absolutely hated waiting in any form, from the stress of writing the track itself to pride himself on punctuality, the fact that ‘The Waiting’ emanates a heavy dose of this character is also probably a factor in its legacy.
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