![\"Five](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Five-songs-that-Tom-Petty-wrote-for-other-artists-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Credit: Press<\/p>\n
Thu 25 June 2026 18:00, UK <\/p>\n
Tom Petty<\/a> didn\u2019t get into the music business to try to win any trophies.\u00a0<\/p>\n He wanted to make the best rock and roll that he possibly could, and if anyone stood in the way of him making classics, he wasn\u2019t afraid to go right over their heads, even if that meant sticking it to his own label from time to time. But even if he was one of the biggest names in rock and roll at the time, his brand of heartland rock wasn\u2019t exactly the kind of thing that was happening in the underground.<\/p>\n Then again, Petty was never trying to be looked at as an underground artist anyway. His biggest heroes were bands like The Byrds and The Rolling Stones, and even if that wasn\u2019t the biggest genre in the world at the time, it was a lot easier for him to make that kind of music with the Heartbreakers. And considering how everyone reacted to tunes like \u2018American Girl\u2019, it\u2019s not like the world ever got tired of those jangly guitars after the Summer of Love faded from view. But Petty did have to deal with the spiky-haired crowd more than a few times as well.<\/p>\n Despite being one of the best rock and roll artists he could be, Petty always tended to get thrown in with the new wave artists going on at the time. He may have looked the part on the cover of his debut wearing a bullet belt across his chest, but when you listen to everyone that was breaking through at the time, the idea of The Clash, Elvis Costello, Devo, and Tom Petty being on the charts at the time does seem a little bit odd.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not like Petty took kindly to people calling him a punk, either. He was seething<\/a> when John Lydon tried to talk trash about him on his first trip to England, and even when he made it to New York for the first time, he wasn\u2019t exactly thrilled when playing the legendary CBGBs. Mainly because Petty was already competing with some hometown heroes before he even played a note on that stage.<\/p>\n \u2018The Big Apple\u2019 was already home to some of the biggest names in punk, but while Ramones and Blondie had their own sound by that point, Johnny Thunders\u2019 iteration of the Heartbreakers was already becoming one of the most talked-about bands at the time. Petty already had an uphill battle when he came out singing tunes like \u2018Breakdown\u2019<\/a>, but he felt that his mission was to leave people like Thunders in the dust.<\/p>\n Petty wasn\u2019t looking to start a fight by any means, but he also wasn\u2019t going to pretend like there wasn\u2019t a sense of resentment between him and his New York counterpart, saying<\/a>, \u201cWe didn\u2019t know about that band for a long time. We heard about it right before we played CBGBS; that there was another local band called the Heartbreakers.\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/strong><\/p>\n Adding, \u201cBut by that time, I said, I haven\u2019t heard them to this day, and well, ours is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and they can\u2019t get too confused. Sorry and all that, but we ain\u2019t gonna change our name or nothing. That\u2019s really a New York problem.\u201d<\/p>\n And when you listen to both bands together, it\u2019s not like you were going to mistake one for the other. Thunders was making some of the most hard-edged rock and roll that he could, which bordered on absolute chaos, but Petty was the one who was trying to make the tunes that Mick Jagger<\/a> and John Lennon had forgotten about when they started writing back in the 1960s.<\/p>\n Thunders did eventually become a rock and roll legend in his own right, but Petty wasn\u2019t interested in being known for the punk attitude over everything else. He had an agenda, and if he was going to be remembered for anything in his career, he would rather it be the songs he wrote than any of his misbehaviour.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Press Thu 25 June 2026 18:00, UK Tom Petty didn\u2019t get into the music business to try…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1049774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3936],"tags":[91533,77,276808,269,453,21477,16,15],"class_list":["post-1049773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1970s","tag-entertainment","tag-johnny-thunders","tag-music","tag-rock","tag-tom-petty","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116812426297142283","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1049774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}