Blueshadow’s Bon Jovi Blog

Artist: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Album: Hard Promises

This is one of the songs that I remember from one long summer a few years ago, when my musical tastes started undergoing a radical shift.  That year I was walking around on vacation in New Jersey with a beat-up old mp3 player, loaded down with everything from Poison and Bon Jovi to Alice Cooper and Tom Petty.

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Artist: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Album: You’re Gonna Get It

I love this song for being the epitome of what a rock song should be. It’s based around a great basic riff, and builds up from there. The themes are all classic–how can it get any more pure rock and roll than a couple of guys arguing over a girl? Rhythmically speaking, the lyrics fit the song perfectly. Everything just flows–from the intro, through the verses, the chorus and the solo.

‘Listen To Her Heart’ also demonstrates the perfect sense of timing that Tom Petty has. Like many of his best songs, this one clocks in at just over three minutes. Four minutes might be the cutoff for radio airplay, but they didn’t need it here, and rather than overstay its welcome, the song ends at the right moment.

I might have originally gotten into Tom Petty for just one song–Refugee–but I really came to appreciate his work because of songs like this one. This song is a perfect exemplar of everything that I’ve come to love about Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers–it illustrates exactly how much can be done with just the pure basics.

Artist: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Album: Damn the Torpedoes

I originally got this album while I was trying to draw a comic book. I’d heard “Refugee” on the radio, and it became an important chunk of the soundtrack in my head, so I actually sought this album out for this particular song. It’s actually fairly unusual for me to discover a band by listening to terrestrial radio–but Tom Petty is the exception.

Like many songs in my library, this song brings back memories of a specific time in my life. I was getting close to graduating from college, and I had at least figured out what I wanted to do with my life. (At that point in time, drawing comic book illustrations was an escape from my classwork. My secondary major was in studio art and after doing highly conceptual paintings and prints for several years, breaking out the pen and ink to draw ridiculous characters having stupid personal problems was a welcome break.)

But the song became a favorite independent of the original inspiration that it gave me. It ended up on my mp3 player, and got carted around with me to a lot of my classes, especially studio classes. Hearing this song still reminds me of being in the painting studio, lugging giant canvases up three flights of steps, and the smell of turpentine.

The song itself embodies a lot of what good, basic rock music should be: a basic universal message with a great hook. This is a song that still likes to take up residence in my brain and refuse to leave for awhile. It isn’t as guitar-heavy as my usual fare, but the both the guitar and the organ are used to good effect in the song.

There’s also something about the beat of “Refugee” that makes it a great cruising song in the car. I’ve already cruised right past my exit while rocking out to this song!