(Credits: Far Out / Songwriters Hall of Fame / Frank Schwichtenberg)
Sat 15 November 2025 2:00, UK
Different artists have different approaches to songwriting, you won’t be surprised to hear. The result is the variety of great music out there.
Tom Petty was one of those writers who was happy to go into a flow state when he started creating. This meant that he just let a song naturally develop and trusted his gut when it was time to call it a day. Some songs needed a little bit more thought than that, but for the most part, he went straight for it, headfirst into the creative process, emerging from the other side with a fully fledged song.
There were a lot of instances where this worked incredibly well for him. For instance, the song ‘Wildflowers’ is often considered one of Petty’s best, and this was a track he didn’t overcomplicate very much. He just trusted his gut and instinct, and the end result was this great track.
“I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” he said, “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
While this system worked at times, it wasn’t always perfect. There were some instances where the song would be deemed finished by Petty, but those listening would have liked him to take things further. In other words, some tracks of his were left slightly unfinished. This is how Ann Wilson felt when she heard the track ‘Luna’, as while she was a big fan of it, she didn’t feel as though Petty took it as far as it could go, and it felt as though he had stopped writing halfway through.
When Ann Wilson started putting together a covers album, she decided to use it as an opportunity to put her own spin on songs she already loved. ‘Luna’ fell into that category, as Wilson took it upon herself to finish what she considered only a partly finished track.
Her approach to putting her spin on covers was simple; she just let the song dictate the direction it went in. “I always believe the songs tell you what to do,” she said, “If you listen the right way, they speak loud. You’re right about people just doing copies of songs, and that’s not very exciting; that just makes you a tribute band.”
When it came to ‘Luna’, it was easy to choose what to do, as she just wanted to finish the song in her image. “Well, when I used to listen to ‘Luna’ on Tom Petty’s first album, that song would always tell me that it wanted to go farther,” she said, “I’d listen to it and get into it a lot and then it would be over (laughs) and I’d think, ‘Wow, they could have developed it more.’ Of course, not to question Petty’s instincts.”
She concluded, “But at the time I always longed for it to be more developed, and to go deeper into that sultry groove, so that’s what I did. For any of these artists that I covered, I didn’t want to just skim the hits off the top; I didn’t just want to go for their hits and do it one more time. I wanted to go for the songs that really turned me on the most.”
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