Musical Osmosis: The classic Tom Petty song that “just came tumbling out”
There’s no right or wrong when it comes to writing songs. Even if it’s easier to rely on every cliché in the book in the hopes that you pull the wool over someone’s eyes, it’s always better to write about something real than try to fool your audience. Tom Petty was always authentic in everything he did, though, and writing a song like ‘American Girl’ is one of the few instances where the music seemed to flow through him.
Then again, that’s not the first time that artists have talked about being emotional translators when they are writing songs. Paul McCartney has always chalked up writing ‘Yesterday’ to hearing it in a dream, so there’s usually some kind of sixth sense that comes along that artists are somehow able to capture in a song.
By the time Petty had gotten started with the Heartbreakers, it seemed like the entire music world had started to turn its back on him. After trying his hand at being in a band in Mudcrutch, everything fell apart when the album flopped, leading to Petty staying on behind the scenes as a songwriter.
That doesn’t give you the same camaraderie as being in a group, and when Petty saw the musicians that would make up the Heartbreakers, he knew he had something that would work. All he needed was the song, and ‘American Girl’ was the kind of track that told the story of the US in just a few deft strokes.
When talking about the song, Petty said that the music was almost writing itself, saying, he “wrote that in a little apartment I had in Encino. The words just came tumbling out very quickly – and it was the start of writing about people who are longing for something else in life, something better than they have”.
Although Petty still had his unique sound, hearing him describe the lives of normal people has much more in common with Bruce Springsteen’s music than his brand of heartland rock. Springsteen was coming from the East Coast, though, and while Petty started in the South, his song radiated sunshine from the minute he began working on it.
Blending in between the sound of The Beatles and the jangle-pop of The Byrds, ‘American Girl’ feels like the long-awaited rock band that The Beach Boys had only hinted at. Brian Wilson may have been the mastermind behind American music, but Petty was more interested in telling stories rather than the traditional love songs.
Even Rick Rubin was stunned by how Petty worked when he started working with him on the album Wildflowers, telling Runnin’ Down a Dream, “I don’t think if he forced it, it would happen. I think it just needs to be the right time when a song starts, and it doesn’t happen…He’s come to me with a song [with a] complex story, and I’ll ask him later what it means, and he says he has no idea”.
Petty may have been able to write decent songs to order when he wanted to, but ‘American Girl’ is an example of a song where he captured a specific moment in time. No matter how many times it has been played on the radio, the minute that you hear those chiming guitars, you can see a picture of what the American Dream is supposed to be.