It's New to Me: Hard Promises by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (1981)

Cover illustration from Vaclav Bene-Tebizsky's Z Rznych Dob, 1902

My recent discovery of Tom Petty's excellent 1982 album Long After Dark may turn out to have been the beginning of something big because I'm going deeper into the mid-/early-Petty albums and I'm liking what I'm hearing. From Long After Dark, I backtracked to the albums that preceded it, 1981's Hard Promises and 1979's Damn the Torpedoes. I'll write about them both eventually, but for now I prefer the former album to the latter, so I'm going to talk about that one a little.

I know that this goes against conventional wisdom, but I think that Hard Promises is not quite as good as Long After Dark. Or maybe it's a better album, but it just doesn't suit my tastes quite as well. I think that the big problem is "The Waiting" - unlike the weird hit single from Long After Dark ("You Got Lucky"), "The Waiting" is an undeniable, perfect guitar-pop song. It doesn't help that it's the lead-off track on the album, casting a long shadow over everything that follows. The song's that immediately follow it definitely suffer - "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)" is a longtime fan favorite with a harder rock sound and it has a good lyric, but the wailing guitar on the chorus bugs me. "Nightwatchman" and "Something Big" come after that, and they're just kind of there, not trying too hard to justify their existence.

By the time we get to "Kings Road", we're only in the penumbra of "The Waiting" and the songs start to sound a little better (also, they're just better songs). "Kings Road" and the two songs that follow it ("Letting You Go" and "A Thing About You") are solid rootsy power-pop of the kind I like from this vintage of Petty songs. "Letting You Go", in particular, does a good job of using some "retro" touches to give the song a timeless feel, and I love the "whoa whoa" vocals on the chorus. This string of good songs is topped off by "Insider", a duet with Stevie Nicks that is a new favorite of mine - I was pretty surprised that Petty and Nicks have voices that blend well, but it works really nicely. Nicks also sings backup on the closing ballad, "You Can Still Change Your Mind", a song that seemed pretty boring to me at first, but it's lodged itself in my head a few times since I started listening to this album. It benefits from being on the far end of the album from "The Waiting", and it builds nicely to a bouncy bridge and then a big finish.

So far, I'm really digging early '80s Petty. I'm becoming increasingly skeptical about 1979's Damn the Torpedoes, though - it's supposed to be one of his best, but it's not doing it for me so far. Maybe it's because it breaks the "Ten Song Rule". Maybe I'll warm up to it as I listen to it more.

"Letting You Go" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers