Introduction

On September 27, 2017, Tom Petty – the legendary US singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer – gave his last interview from the recording studio in his Malibu mansion. Living in the Santa Monica Mountains in Southern California, he was a long way from where he started life in Gainesville, Florida. While Petty and his band, The Heartbreakers, were often associated with the California sound of The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, country and folk influences from his southeastern US upbringing were always deeply embedded in their music as well – from lyrics that offered motifs of southern life to their delivery in Petty's thick southern drawl. His depictions of the South were highly personal, shaped by the complexities of growing up in a college town that was both southern yet not entirely southern, as well as his difficult relationship with his volatile and abusive father.

The link between music, place, and space is well documented with numerous studies on social and emotional "place attachment" in lyrics that examine the ways in which setting is tied up with discourses of identity, authenticity, and a sense of belonging (see Barna; Hogan; O'Hagan; Milburn). However, there is a lack of research on the lyrics of Tom Petty, despite being widely recognized as one of the greatest US songwriters and having won multiple songwriting accolades throughout his career (see Sands, for exception). This study explores the place-space connection in Petty's music with a particular emphasis on how he used lyrics to make sense of both his upbringing in Gainesville and his (non)relationship with his father. Seeking ultimately to reconcile with his past, Petty's music – while global in its impact – remained inherently grounded in a clearly definable local environment with its own cultural roots and traditions.

This research builds on the work of Emilia Barna who applied Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "chronotope" (i.e., how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse) to the music of The Beatles and The Kinks. According to Bakhtin, "temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another, and always colored by emotions and values" (243). Applied to the music of Petty, we can see that his lifelong attempt to reconcile with his past operated like a grief cycle, whereby his sense-making process was constructed through lyrical narratives inspired by his own life and influenced by his own experiences, beliefs, and worldview. This study identifies five clear periods in Petty's songwriting from his formative years with Mudcrutch in the early 1970s to his final album in 2016 that roughly map onto the five stages of the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. My argument, thus, demonstrates both the intricacies and discrepancies of Petty's represented world and showcases how his lyrics were bound in an emotional attachment to place that makes his music believable, relatable, and timeless. Overall, this investigation demonstrates how the application of psychosocial theory, sifted through a Bakhtinian lens, contributes to more nuanced understandings of place-space in music, particularly when the musician in question has experienced a challenging upbringing.¹

Tom Petty:
The Early Years

In his 1990 monograph on collective memory and American popular culture, George Lipsitz argues that popular music is "the product of an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has the first or last word" (99). Popular music is, thus, dialogic with traces of the past constantly pervading the present, whether in terms of musical styles, forms, or song lyrics. When it comes to songwriting, many artists engage with the past to create vivid, personal portraits of places and spaces; tell tales of economic hardship and working-class struggles; and thus provide resilience, hope, and a strong sense of community or identity (see Moss and Womack et al. on Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey; see also Duchan, Salkin, and Crisci on Billy Joel and New York). Others may look back at their upbringing with nostalgia and affection (see Barna and Lieberfeld on The Beatles) or connect their individual stories to broader themes of escapism and freedom (see Elliott and Panda on Bob Dylan). Place-space connections in song lyrics can also have a quasi-therapeutic function, enabling musicians to make sense of their place in the world and come to terms with difficult or traumatic childhoods (see Armstrong and Fosbraey on Eminem). This latter circumstance was the case for Tom Petty.

Thomas Earl Petty was born in Gainesville, Florida, on October 20, 1950. Gainesville was part of an America "moving full speed ahead into the glorious fifties" and owed its transformation and growth to the rapid post-war expansion of the University of Florida (Zanes 15). According to biographer Warren Zanes, Gainesville offered a place for those pushed to the margins as ethnic outsiders to ensconce in middle-class suburban environments and transition into being "white" while its university acted like a "door" for strangers to walk through, bringing more progressive and diverse ideas, beliefs, and worldviews with them (16, 33). This evolution led to an unexpectedly thriving music scene by the 1960s with concerts by Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Escorts (an early version of The Allman Brothers), and The Continentals (featuring Stephen Stills, Don Felder, and later Bernie Leadon of The Eagles) on an average week. However, while the university might have made the town, the town "didn’t just go away," and traditional southern mentalities could still be found when it came to religious faith, social and political conservatism, rural and agrarian values, family ties, and pride in heritage (Zanes 33). Nonetheless, rock music was starting to show Gainesville's youth that there was more to life than "catching catfish, trapping squirrels, working in the town's turpentine factory, or gutting pigs in the local slaughterhouses" (Zanes 47-48).

Petty's father, Earl, hailed from Argyle, Georgia, and was the son of logger William "Pulpwood" Petty whose interracial marriage to a Cherokee Indian, Sallie Henderson, had outraged his local community. According to Tom Petty, the family never spoke about their Native American heritage as they swiftly realized that there was "no point in trying to be anything other than a white family" if they wanted to fit in with mid-twentieth century southern American culture (Zanes 13). Petty had an unhappy relationship with his father, often referring to him as "Jerry Lee Lewis with no talent" (Rotondo 18). In other words, his father was "crazy" and "wild"; the type of person who could be incredibly charming one minute, but "still might shoot you" the next (Rotondo 18). Earl was also a heavy drinker, gambler, and physically as well as verbally abusive to Petty, his mother, and younger brother, Bruce. Earl hunted and fished, carried pistols, drove his car into ditches, and thought nothing of punching alligators or snapping rattlesnakes' necks. He had served in the US Air Force, yet since leaving the army after World War II and settling in Gainesville, Earl moved from job to job – whether as an insurance salesman, grocer, or truck driver. Tom never felt safe at home and learned to "get the f--- away" whenever Earl was around (Eells). Reflecting on the situation later in life, Petty stated that his father's bravado, machismo, and anger came from a deep fear of his Native American heritage being discovered. As Zanes explains, Earl "was like a man hiding out in plain view…there was a lot of theater in his life, a lot of masks, a lot of acting" (15).

Petty's mother Kitty, on the other hand, was a "complete angel" and "the glue that held the family together" (Fong-Torres; Runnin’ Down a Dream). Born in Sycamore, Georgia, she had moved to Gainesville as a young woman "aspiring to be better than that, not to be country" (Zanes 14). Kitty was always supportive, nurturing, and tried to maintain "an element of civilization" in the house to show Petty and his brother that there was "more to life than rednecks" (Eells). She also enjoyed music and some of Petty's earliest memories include her listening to Nat King Cole or West Side Story on her record player. Despite her unhappy marriage, she never considered leaving Earl as "it just wasn't done" at that time (Zanes 32).

Being part of a turbulent household, Tom Petty quickly found his escape in television and music, which offered him a "safe space" and a lifeline to a world outside of North Central Florida (Rotondo 33). A life-changing moment came in the summer of 1961 when eleven-year-old Petty met Elvis Presley on the set of Follow That Dream, shot in Ocala, Florida. From that moment forward, Petty became consumed by music, tuned into WLS radio every day, and hung out at local record stores where he learned to play guitar. In that very same year, Petty's parents and his brother Bruce were involved in a car crash – the result of Earl’s drunk driving – which affected Kitty's health for the rest of her life. Petty recognized the car crash as a pivotal moment for him when he realized that he "had to just keep pushing ahead [with his music], get more and more independent" to escape Gainesville and his dysfunctional family (Zanes 58).

At age 14, Petty penned his first composition "Baby I'm Leaving" and, shortly after, formed his first band, The Sundowners. In 1965, The Sundowners won the local Battle of the Bands, their prize being a regular Friday spot at the Moose Club dance. Petty then went on to join The Epics, before forming his own band Mudcrutch in 1970. Mudcrutch soon became the house band for Dub's Street Room and organized several well-attended musical festivals at Mudcrutch Farm – a rundown house on a large lot where drummer Randall Marsh and guitarist Mike Campbell lived. Mudcrutch was swiftly making a name for itself in Gainesville, but Petty was clear that he wanted to seek opportunities for his music outside of Florida.

"A Little More to Life Somewhere Else":
Denial and Escapism

Speaking to Pulse! in 1999 about Gainesville, Petty admitted that he "discovered the limitations of the place early on" (Di Perna). "I wasn't the kind of person who would have been content to settle and stay there," he added (Di Perna). After a brief recording session in Criteria Studios, Miami, Mudcrutch set their sights on Hollywood. "Everything really great seemed to be coming from California…and I thought, 'Man, that's where I really need to be,'" Petty later told Zanes (21-22). The band immediately attracted interest from several large record companies. They eventually signed with Shelter Records and were sent to work on an album at Village Recorder in Santa Monica. By this time, Petty's relationship with his father was so bad that he had learned to internalize his feelings as a means of coping (Zanes 57). His escape from Gainesville, thus, marked a new period in his life in which turning his back on his hometown was almost a self-defense move or a survival instinct. In the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle, this process of denial is seen as one of the "psyche's protective mechanisms" and is an essential first step in coping with loss and moving on (4). Suppressing past memories can lead to a focus on "external storytelling" as a form of distraction or self-encouragement, before eventually beginning an inward search for understanding (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 10). These features are apparent in Petty's songwriting at the time.

Petty's early songs with Mudcrutch are a sign of him testing the waters and experimenting with lyrical themes and sounds in a somewhat naive manner. Despite insisting that Florida "just wasn"t the place for us," Gainesville crept into his lyrics, most notably in "Depot Street" – named after a downtown road (Uhelszki). The song's unusual reggae beat, however, shifts "Depot Street" from Florida to Jamaica, which moves the parochial lyrics into a broader global context. Thus, when Petty sings about dancing with his sweetheart in the park, the listener instead imagines a Caribbean setting. Here, "Depot Street" refashions the road chronotope into a new time-space relationship based around transnational freedom and alternative life perspectives (see Ganser et al.). Reflecting on the song in 2015, Petty dismissed it as a "novelty record," inspired by the strong impression that reggae had on him (Zanes 92). However, this rejection overlooks the mark of a band finding their way and embracing external musical influences as they seek a world outside of Gainesville, yet still have limited knowledge of such world. This naivete is also discernible in Mudcrutch's song "Up in Mississippi Tonight" (1973) about a girl named Sally who moves to Biloxi and falls in love with a rich man, yet her boy back home pines for her. "You'd have to be really south to be up in Mississippi," Petty joked later on, emphasizing just what a local sense of the world he had at that time (Zollo 302).

After failing to gain commercial success, Mudcrutch disbanded in 1975. Petty went on to form his own band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (TP&TH), with former Mudcrutch members Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, as well as drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair. The first TP&TH albums are dominated by themes of rebellion, independence, restlessness, youthful defiance, a desire to break free from societal constraints, and the disillusionment of the American dream – all influenced by Petty's unstable upbringing in Gainesville and the opportunities afforded to him after moving to Los Angeles. While the South was occasionally referenced in his lyrics – most notably in geographical locales or flora and fauna – Petty's outlook addressed a world outside Florida, a world that would change his Weltanschauung, his worldview, forever.

While Petty was not yet ready to undertake the deep introspection that would come later in his career, his lyrics at this time do reflect his personal feelings, such as "she couldn't help thinking there was a little more to life somewhere else" in "American Girl" (1976). The song, which tells the story of a girl who feels trapped in her hometown and longs for freedom, enables Petty to reflect on his own past yet through the safe confines of another character, thereby giving him emotional distance (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 10). In the song's second verse, the girl finally leaves her hometown, yet a man from her past "crept back in her memory," which is "so painful" – again, perhaps an allusion to Petty's own father. Her decision to suppress those feelings and keep moving on also speaks to Petty's own mantra at this time: what was going on back home was "so painful to think about, [he] almost didn't want to know" (Zanes 139).

Like "American Girl," "Louisiana Rain" from TP&TH's 1979 breakthrough album Damn the Torpedoes also addresses feelings of displacement and the search for belonging, yet this time from a more southern-oriented perspective. However, once again, Petty uses a character as a safe way to explore home and protect himself (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 10). The song plays on the threshold chronotope, which is "connected with the breaking point in life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life," as it tells the story of a man who heads back home to Baton Rouge after a failed relationship with a girl in San Diego (Bakhtin 146). The man's journey is full of trials and tribulations with time and space converging at critical junctures. As he gets closer to home, the sky pours with rain, acting as a external metaphor for his internal emotional turbulence, yet also conveying cleansing and renewal (see Sensoy). The lyrics suggests that once a person has gone away not only is it hard to go home but also they will return a changed person. Petty himself conveyed similar feelings in interviews throughout his career when he explained that the unhappy memories of Gainesville made it hard for him to go back and that his father in particular "took the dignity out of a trip home" (Zanes 175).

Around the same time, Petty also wrote "Casa Dega," which was subsequently released as a B-Side to "Don't Do Me Like That." The song was based on the small town of Cassadega, fifty miles north of Orlando, known as the "Psychic Capital of the World." "Casa Dega" takes the threshold chronotope further by tapping into a mystical and magical folklore associated with pre-modern society. Petty's lyrics paint an evocative image of a man entering Cassadega at night, having his fortune told, and "starting to believe the things that [he's] heard" about the town. Engaging the idyllic/folkloric chronotope associated with Florida enables Petty to include aspects of home that are more favorable and, thus, avoid addressing the realities of his upbringing. As Singh notes, in the idyllic/folkloric chronotope, the passage of time conjoins "events of human life" with "natural agrarian phenomena," creating a unified sense of the world and promoting growth and a movement towards flowering and ripening (Singh 5; Bakhtin 207). Embracing these feelings – as Petty does in "Casa Dega" – is necessary to move to the next step in the Grief Cycle: anger.

"Born a Rebel":
Anger and Resentment

The years following Damn the Torpedoes were challenging for Petty. His mother passed away in 1980 after a long battle with cancer while his father used Petty's fame to his own advantage to sleep with women and gain cultural capital in Gainesville. Expecting a media storm, Petty made the difficult decision not to attend his mother's funeral – a decision about which he remained conflicted for the rest of his life. Following Kitty's death, Petty's resentment for his father grew, particularly when Earl turned up at concerts with young girlfriends or asking for money and autographs. Tom Petty's daughter, Adria, notes how her father's "super happy" demeanor changed to anger during and after these events (Zanes 157). Before, Petty had only engaged with folkloric aspects of the South in his music, but after this turning point in his life, he began to think about his upbringing in "a real Southern family," surrounded by people unable to "shake free" from the legacy of the South (Rotondo 120; Gilmore). He admitted that these memories were "tearing" at him, and he needed to do something to address that world and "get this out of [his] system" (Gilmore). The result was the concept album Southern Accents.

The first song that Petty came up with was "Rebels," which he wrote from the perspective of a stereotypical redneck who is arrested for being drunk and disorderly, feels frustrated with his life, and tries to blame it on his heritage (Zollo 245). Although Petty never discussed the parallels between the song's protagonist and his own father, Earl, in the press, the comparisons are striking. The song opens with Petty wailing the line, "Honey, don't walk out, I'm too drunk to follow" as the protagonist pleads with his girlfriend and makes excuses for his poor behavior. The second verse follows the story as his girlfriend pays the bail to release him from prison while the chorus sees the protagonist asserting his identity as a "rebel" who was born "down in Dixie" with "one foot in the grave" and "one foot on the pedal." The final verse then takes a broader historical turn as the protagonist reflects on the Lost Cause myth, blaming the "blue-bellied devils" for the way his life has panned out and recalling how they "burned our cornfields and left our cities leveled" (see Wilson).

While "Rebels" was critiqued for offering a "muddled history" of the South, Petty asserted that the song was ironic (Zollo 245). His aim was to depict a man whose Confederate identity had trapped him in a life of failure in the modern world, a point that was accentuated by the blundering rhymes and humorous diction that create an unreliable narrator and demonstrate the man's inability to take responsibility for his actions. Through the character, Petty sought to shed light on the continued reverberation of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. "If you go to some places in the South, the Civil War is still very present," he stated, citing the problematic stickers in 7-Eleven with phrases like "Hell no, we ain't forgetting" and "Lee surrendered – I didn't" (Rotondo 126). Petty's account of the protagonist is, however, deeply personal and conflates his disillusionment with his father and with the South in general, which leads to a negative portrayal of the "rebel."

Cut from Southern Accents, "Trailer" was released as the B-side on the single "Don't Come Around Here No More." "Trailer" operates in the same vein as "Rebels," recounting the story of a down on his luck southerner who lives in a mobile home, loses his girlfriend, and reflects on his wasted life – "I coulda had the Army, I coulda had the Navy, but no, I had to go for a mobile home." Here, the trailer acts as a symbol, metaphor, even a chronotope of poverty and rural life as the protagonist muses on the happy places and times when he and his girlfriend used to dance to Lynyrd Skynyrd – a quintessential Southern rock band, also from Florida.

Once "Rebels" was down on paper, Petty was eager to continue pursuing the conflict between old and new ideals in the southeastern US. He envisaged the album "less a comprehensive story than a series of snapshots about life in the South," a chance for him to use the region as a "jumping-off place" to explore the tales of different characters (Washburn 8; Zollo 246). Like "Rebels," these snapshots were highly individualized and built upon a South from his own imagination and experiences growing up in Gainesville. "Spike," for example, was inspired by a punk rocker that Petty often saw around the city wearing biker leathers and a dog collar. One day, Spike enters the Cypress Lounge – "the meanest, nastiest bar in the whole state of Florida," as Petty states in a 2012 live recording of the song – and receives verbal abuse from the patrons. The song begins with Spike innocently singing to himself as he enters the bar before he is abruptly cut off by an "ignorant redneck guy" (Zollo 250). Here, Petty adopts a sarcastic tone as he embodies the protagonist accosting Spike: "Oh, we got another one, just like the other ones. Another badass, another troublemaker. I'm scared. Ain't you boys scared?" Spike is seemingly unbothered and continues to sing, but the redneck persists, lamenting how "the future ain't what it used to be" and shouting at Spike to listen to him. As the song progresses, however, things become less clear; the protagonist seems genuinely curious about Spike and asks for his view on life – even musing on whether he should also get a dog collar. A jaunty tune plays as Spike leaves the bar amid the sounds of dogs panting. As Griswold notes, this ending leaves the song open to interpretation: "Is Spike an outsider? Threat, not victim? Contagion? A bringer of awareness of difference? A changer of lives? Read in this way, Spike represents a rare alternative voice in Gainesville. He seems unaffected by his conservative surroundings, which leads Petty to feel a certain admiration for him.

"Southern Accents," on the other hand, features a protagonist who is a similar yet far more likeable character than the protagonist in "Rebels." Again, the South that Petty portrays is based on familiar geographical surroundings such as the orange groves in Orlando to the "drunk tank in Atlanta." However, lines like "I got my own way of talkin'" and "I got my own way of workin'" are general enough that they can resonate with people across the southeastern US, from Texas to Georgia. The tone of the song changes halfway through, flipping to Petty's own voice as a vision of his mother appears before him, kneels down, and says a prayer – often described by critics as his "Let it Be" moment in reference to the classic Beatles song (Zollo 248). Petty sings:

For just a minute there I was dreaming
For just a minute it was all so real.
For just a minute she was standing there, with me

Unable to mourn at his mother's funeral, Petty's dream chronotope acts as a poignant chance for him to finally grieve and ask Kitty for forgiveness. These emotions are driven along by Jack Nitzsche's string arrangement and the simple accompanying piano. Seen more broadly, "Southern Accents" captures Petty's own sense of personal conflict at feeling simultaneously connected to and distanced from his Southern roots. Ultimately, Florida is his home, yet that home is both beautiful and problematic – due to its history and Petty's troubled relationship with his father. In his lyrics here, Petty remains unsure how to reconcile that past with his present.

Released in March 1985, Southern Accents was condemned for its exclusively white depiction of the South. According to Washburn, the South of Petty's imagination blindly endorsed "some of the most corrosive myths of American culture and history" (8). Furthermore, the album exhibited a "staggeringly uncritical stance" towards commonplace historical misunderstandings of the South and provided a "narrow conception" of southern identity (Washburn 8). Petty was quick to counter these arguments by affirming that the album was about a series of characters based on his own personal experiences of growing up in Gainesville, but this point of view did not deny other realities. He also emphasized how his portrayals were deliberately in character and did not reflect his own beliefs. Speaking later on the subject, Petty added that he had written a song called "Sheets" that criticized racism in the South, but its bleak tone led him not to include it on the album (Zanes 188). Critiques of Southern Accents also extended to its cover, which was condemned for its ingenuous understanding of American history. The painting – The Veteran in a New Field by Winslow Homer (1865) – depicts a Union soldier reaping a field and represented the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War, as well as the hope for a new future. Both Petty and album art director Tommy Steele admit that they were ignorant of the fact that the soldier was Unionist, nor did they consider that the wheat symbolized the North (Zanes 9).

These issues with the album and its artwork were exacerbated by the accompanying promotional tour, which featured the Confederate flag prominently on stage, in the tour program, and even on Petty's clothing. Not only did this display deepen his connection with fans who identified with problematic aspects of southern culture but also it isolated others who assumed that he was Neo-Confederate. Petty was also chastised by the press and fellow musicians, such as Mike Bills of REM, for his ill-advised decisions. He responded that the flag was not meant "in any racist sense at all," and he had foolishly assumed that it could be used neutrally in a rock show to represent the characters in the lyrics of Southern Accents (Rotondo 126). Consequently, he removed the flag from his concerts and future prints of the record and even discouraged people from bringing it to his shows. "It was a downright stupid thing to do," he told Rolling Stone in 2017 (qtd. in Greene). Petty explained, "It's like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person…I still feel bad about it…I would never do anything to hurt someone" (qtd. in Greene).

"California's Been Good to Me":
Bargaining and Reinvention

According to Washburn, Southern Accents was the "most artistically pivotal" moment of Petty's career because the controversies shaped the direction of his music for the next decade. During this time, he repudiated southern iconography as well as his Florida identity (11). Since he was a child, Petty had always viewed California with a wide-eyed, sunny optimism, with bands like The Beach Boys and the Mamas and Papas mythologizing the state's landscape and way of life (see Starr). While the sound of Petty's music had always been associated with California breeziness, his lyrics now also became oriented in this direction, and he began to fully embrace the Los Angeles atmosphere in which he lived. This break with Petty's past fits with the bargaining phase of the Grief Cycle, characterized by deep feelings of guilt and "what ifs," as well as a struggle to find meaning and negotiate a way out of the hurt. In this phase, a person seeks to "restore order to chaos" by keeping suffering at a distance, often through rejection and reinvention (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 20). "I think we're really Californians," Petty told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 (qtd. in Lewis). He elaborated, “[W]here you grow up is always going to be deeply embedded in your soul,” but he was also disappointed not to be included in discussions of Southern California music (qtd. in Lewis).

Full Moon Fever (1989) – Petty's first solo album – is perhaps his most overt display of "Californiality" in terms of both music and lyrics, with "Freefallin'" solidifying his Californian reinvention. According to Chlland, both the song and the video "perfectly capture the popular image of the 1980s-era San Fernando Valley as a bizarre suburban wilderness driven by consumerism and teenage angst." In its lyrics, Petty mentions Reseda, Ventura Boulevard, and Mulholland Boulevard while the video shows him as a flâneur clad in sunglasses as he looks down over images of swimming pools, parties, shopping malls, fancy cars, pretty girls, and colorful sunsets. The setting could not be further away from life in Florida depicted in songs like "Rebels." This utopian view of Los Angeles is distinctly grounded in the present; the lyrics and music video reflect the here and now of 1980s California. The song, thus, serves as an updated version of the California Myth depicted by such bands as The Beach Boys. "Freefallin'" emphasizes sunshine, opportunities, and prosperity alongside a carefree attitude and idealized lifestyle. Although Bakhtin's idyllic chronotype is usually associated with rural environments, it works here as well. In this context, Los Angeles is a city immune to "conventional or 'real' time" where it is always sunny, "always afternoon" (Waithe 463). This musical experience situates the Los Angeles of "Freefallin'" outside of the quotidian challenges and realities of actual city life.

As Holloway and Hubbard note, place myths always have an accompanying "anti-myth," which is constructed in opposition (118). This antithesis is visible in Petty's work: his follow-up album with The Heartbreakers – Into the Great Wide Open (1990) – again favors California stories, but this time with a more realistic edge. The title track, "Into the Great Wide Open," recounts the tale of a musician called Eddie who moves to Los Angeles in search of fortune and fame. While listeners are first told that "the sky was the limit" for Eddie, they are forewarned of his fate by the ominous line in the chorus: "a rebel without a clue." While the song ends ambiguously with an A&R man sneering, "I don't hear a single," the all-star accompanying music video (Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, and Gabrielle Anwar) provides closure to the story as it shows Eddie's downfall: he develops a drinking problem and works in the tattoo parlor that he first visited when he arrived in Los Angeles. This account is "equal parts cautionary tale, imaginative coming-of-age story, and tongue-in-cheek criticism of an industry that, at its worst, preys on its youngest creators" (Crawford). Equally, "All the Wrong Reasons" provides another morality tale about a wealthy LA family who loses all their money in the recession. Here, Petty provides a sardonic account of how the woman "made a vow to have it all, it became her new religion," and the "big ol' man goes up for sale, he becomes his own invention."

Petty’s anti-myths of Los Angeles continued into 1992 when he penned "Peace in LA" after the city's riots in April. Petty wrote the song in a single sitting as he watched the news in horror, gathered his band quickly in the studio, released it within twenty-four hours, and gave all proceeds to local charities. "I wanted to make a statement," he told Rolling Stone at the time (qtd. in "Randon Notes"). Petty explained, "Everyone was outraged. People of all colors were pissed off. I felt trapped" (qtd. in "Randon Notes"). The Los Angeles that Petty depicts in the lyrics is unrecognizable from that of "Freefallin'"; it is a city full of "hurt and frustration," "beating and shouting," "burning and looting." The powerful interspersal of real sound clips from live news reports accentuates these emotions.

However, the Los Angeles riots were not enough to fracture Petty's love for his adopted city. "California," which ended up on his 1996 album She's the One, acted as a love letter to the Golden State, with Petty singing about how it has "treated [him] good" and that "it ain't like anywhere else." Tapping once again into the idyllic chronotope, he also makes reference to the need to "trust yourself" and "save yourself," California being the place to offer such comfort and stability. During this time, Petty's relationship with his first wife Jane was becoming increasingly fractured, with the emotional and verbal abuse he suffered bringing back traumatic memories of his father. "California," thus, offered a form of escapism for him as it stood in direct contrast to the adult world of "manipulation and control" – instead representing unspoiled freedom and innocence (Moran 165).²

"Headed Back Down South":
Depression and Nostalgia

The late 1990s were perhaps the darkest period in Petty's life. In 1996, he divorced his wife and spiraled into a deep depression, which led to heroin addiction. Then, in 1999, his father Earl died, followed four years later by bandmate Howie Epstein (who had replaced Ron Blair in 1982). Despite his unhappy relationship with Earl, Petty flew to Gainesville for the funeral, but made the decision not to stay long because the city "could be tricky to navigate" (Zanes 267). Several weeks earlier, Earl had phoned Petty and, for the first time, told his son that he loved him and was proud of him. For Petty, it was "kind of a touching moment," but he was upset that it had not come sooner (Zanes 268). Following his father's passing, Petty was filled with feelings of self-recrimination, regret, and helplessness – all characteristics of the depression stage in the Grief Cycle. However, this grief was not just directed at the loss of his father, but also at the loss of his childhood and the bad memories that had outweighed the good in his mind for so many years. As Kübler-Ross and Kessler note, in this stage of the Grief Cycle, people look for answers and seek to "cleanse" themselves by exploring the loss in its entirety (22). This process can lead them to reengage with their past and reconstruct past emotional experiences evoked by nostalgia. In Petty's case, he began to move away from the California themes in his lyrics and think once more about his birthplace.

Fred Davis describes nostalgia as the rediscovery of a presumed "secret self" that enables a return – in the mind – to the place associated with one's childhood, yet this reality is often mixed with imagination (39). In popular music, Barna gives the example of The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," a song that "evoke[s] memories that emerge from childhood in a mysterious and dream like way" (50). This process leads to the development of "place myths," which are based on an "individual's understanding of a particular place and are, thus, highly subjective, sensed, and experienced" (Holloway and Hubbard 143). These characteristics are apparent in Petty's "Dreamville" – a song on the 2002 album The Last DJ.

"Dreamville" is an example of "reflective nostalgia," with Petty wistfully addressing growing up in Gainesville, the distance of time helping him to realize that not all his memories are bad (Boym 41). As Svetlana Boym notes, reflective nostalgia cherishes "shattered fragments of memory" and savors the emotions evoked by their recollection (41). However, "Dreamville" is not simply about Petty recovering an idealized past or an escape from the present; it also reflects his effort to reconcile with that past. In line with reflective nostalgia's focus on "details" rather than "symbols," he begins by recalling a trip to his local music store – Lillian's – to buy strings for his guitar before being transported to his childhood bedroom where he wakes up to the sounds of a blue jay and rain on his window (Boym). The accompanying piano and string section add to this tone of wistful longing. The high point of the song comes in verse three when Petty sings harmony with himself as he recounts driving with his mother to Glen Springs Pool and listening to rock and roll on the radio. “When I think of her, it makes me smile,” he states, bittersweet.

In between these verses is the simple chorus about "Dreamville" where "the trees were green" and "the air smelled good." More significantly, Dreamville is "where I was born," making clear that the resemblance between the actual and fictional town name is no coincidence. Like "Strawberry Fields Forever," Petty's reflections turn Gainesville into a magical, dreamlike place outside of time; it is no longer somewhere to escape, but somewhere to return. According to Zanes, "Dreamville" hinted at how Petty would spend the next decade of his artistic life: "going back, sorting through some boxes, questioning old friends" (277). For this songwriter, going back implied that there was something that he needed to find; returning to North Central Florida was as much about his future as his past.

Four years before "Dreamville," Petty had written a song entitled "Gainesville," yet decided not to release it because it did not fit with the rather dark tone of the Echo album he was working on at the time. However, the song was released posthumously in 2018 with a music video, featuring archival footage of Petty and his band. "Gainesville" fits more into the realm of "restorative nostalgia" in which the past is presented as truth and recreated as a "value for the present," with emblems and rituals of home emphasized (Boym 41). The song title itself also reflects a reality rather than a fantasy. More upbeat than "Dreamsville," "Gainesville" casts a sentimental gaze over the town as Petty recalls the fun he had on Mudcrutch Farm and the excitement for future adventures. He reminisces about a roadie, Sandy Stringfellow, loading up the van before they drive off into the unknown: "on and on and on we go, good times roll and then move on." After they escape Gainesville, they are able to appreciate its beauty and leave behind a piece of their hearts. Barna notes the "myth of the suburbs" is a chronotope related to the "myth of the golden age," which stands for freedom, community values, and a happy social life, evident in songs like The Beatles' "Penny Lane." This myth can be seen in “Gainesville”: while earlier depictions such as those on Southern Accents were inherently negative and tied up with traditional rural American imagery, here, Gainesville is a liberal town where inhabitants can do yoga in the high grass, smoke marijuana, sing, and dance. In a 2016 interview for Uncut, Petty himself acknowledged how he had taken so much for granted when he lived in Gainesville and that it was "an oasis in the South" compared to neighboring places (qtd. in Thomson).

Another typical chronotope to be found in novels and songs is "the road," often used as a spatial metaphor linking past and future on an individual’s life path (Bakhtin 120). Conjuring memory on an existential level makes sense of and defines one's place in the world (see Barna). This chronotype is essential to "Down South" – a song from Petty's 2006 solo album Highway Companion about a man returning to his hometown for the first time in many years. We soon find out, however, that he is not there to uncover the past, but rather to ensure it remains buried forever, thus disrupting the expected goal of this chronotope and instead imbuing it with mystery and catharsis. Although not strictly autobiographical, Zollo believes that "Down South" was an attempt by Petty to "confront the ghosts of [his] past" (331). The song's imagery is inspired by Petty's own experiences, drawing on Florida's history and mythology as he describes what he sees from his car window – Spanish moss, dogwood, mosquitos, and dry bones – as well as what he imagines – ghosts and spirits from the Civil War "cross the dead fields." The narrator outlines his plans to visit his father's mistress and "buy back her forgiveness," sell the family headstones, look up old friends, and pay off the loans that he owes before developing a new identity for himself based on Mark Twain: "pretend I'm Samuel Clemens, wear seersucker and white linens." We, as listeners, are only presented with an ambiguous half-story and are, thus, left wondering if the narrator is a hero or a villain and what terrible family secrets lurk behind (see Phelan). Throughout the song is the clear sonic presence and production of Jeff Lynne while Mike Campbell's D Major chord with repeating Magnatone tremolo adds to the mystical atmosphere, delivering a feeling "of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing" and suggesting that the protagonist has succeeded in his mission (Gathy 248). "I've rarely written something that I felt so good about. It's up there in my Top Ten of things I ever did," Petty stated in 2005. This comment suggests that the song indeed had a cathartic effect and started him on the path of healing (qtd. in Zollo 331).

"Something Better Down the Road":
Acceptance and Forgiveness

According to Zanes, "a melancholy was coming through" in Petty's writing during the time of Highway Companion, "like a couple layers of anger had been peeled off, and that's what was left" (283). This melancholy slowly turned into acceptance and forgiveness over the remaining decade of Petty's life after overcoming addiction, attending therapy, and meeting his second wife Dana York. "She did save me, I know that," Petty told Zanes (266). As Kübler-Ross and Kessler note, in the acceptance phase of the Grief Cycle, people cease to be angry and start to readjust their understanding of the past by exploring new options of "remembering, recollecting, and reorganizing" (25). This process ultimately fosters a new relationship with their loved one (or birthplace), which allows them to resolve any unfinished business and move on.

A major event in this acceptance phase occurred in 2007 when Petty decided to reunite Mudcrutch. He had always felt regret for how things had ended with the band and was confident that they could still rekindle the old magic. The result was the album Mudcrutch, which was recorded in just two weeks and paid homage to the South in its covers of The Byrds' "Lover of the Bayou" and folk classics "Shady Grove" and "June Apple," as well as the truck-driving country anthem "Six Days on the Road." Of Petty's original compositions, "Crystal River" is the most place-space specific, named after a Florida nature reserve and tapping into the "reflective nostalgia" of "Dreamville" (Boym 41). Petty sings about a woman who lives on the other side of the river and the sense of peace that he feels laying on the bank. "Nothin' can touch me here, no, nothin' can touch me here," he repeats like a mantra throughout the song. The river chronotope itself also promotes a nonlinear construction of time, allowing for Petty's free-flowing thoughts, which reflect a sense of unrestrained emotion and serenity without any attempt to achieve completeness (see Freeman; see also Barna). The song's nine minutes of improvisation – recorded in just one take – led by Campbell's slide guitar and Tench's piano – also evoke the idyllic chronotype, described by Bakhtin as "an organic fastening down, a grafting of life and its events to a…familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies" (225). Here, there is a unity of rhythm between human life and nature; in other words, the idyllic place is deeply personal to Petty and cannot be disconnected from Crystal River. This symbiosis enables him to develop a more positive relationship with the landscape and, in turn, the memories of Florida.

Three years later, Petty reunited with The Heartbreakers to record a new album. Mojo saw Petty directly addressing his relationship with his father on several songs as he continued his journey to come to terms with his past. In "U.S. 41," for example, he outlines his family's close connection to the stretch of road that runs from Miami to Michigan, drawing once again on the road chronotype. Hayward claims that the road chronotope usually "goes from A to B in a finite and chronological time," with the narration following "an ordered sequence of events which lead inexorably to a good or bad end" (301). Petty breaks this tradition with his stream-of-consciousness narrative that shifts temporal setting in accordance with the thoughts and feelings that pass through his mind. The song begins by introducing his father "a-marchin' over the hill" after "workin' all day long" to "put food on the table," followed by his grandfather Pulpwood who "took a wife in '31" and "drove the big machine" filled with lumber to transport. Petty then reflects on his own travel up and down the highway over the years before referencing "Lucky Brown" who found himself in a standoff with the police on U.S. 41 and was killed. The road setting can facilitate a bonding and mutual understanding between characters, which seems to be the case here as Petty speaks with a sense of pride about the male figures in his family – something that he had not done before (see Ganser et al.). Referencing his father to MOJO in 2010, he admitted, "Forgiveness is the key. You have to forgive people and try to understand. That's easy to say and a lot of work to do" (qtd. in Margolis). Petty also taps into the road as escapism theme as he strikes a contrast between Earl and Pulpwood's whole life spent on U.S. 41 while the songwriter used it to "keep on movin'" and ultimately leave Florida. The road, thus, functions symbolically as a form of rebirth and renewal (see Ganser et al.).

"Running Man's Bible," on the other hand, is more introspective, with Petty overtly addressing how he "took on [his] father" and is "still walking" before triumphantly declaring "here's one to glory and survival." The lyricist speaks of his desire to move on, yet his inability to stop wading in the past; the "running man's Bible" represents his search for acceptance and forgiveness as well as the cyclical nature of his thoughts. "Strong confessions made by someone who survived the pain and fear, but hasn't quite worked his way through it," notes Lynne Margolis in American Songwriter. "Something Good Coming" is in a similar vein, with Petty taking a reflective look at his childhood and having an imaginary conversation with his father as he stares out at the water – often used as a chronotope of healing and reconciliation (see Cohen). Even with the distance of death between them, Petty struggles to speak his mind – "I want to tell you, still I hold back" – yet ultimately the songwriter admits how he is "thinkin' bout mama…how she never had a chance, never caught a break, and how we pay for our big mistakes." Rather than express resentment toward his father, Petty instead extends a hand, offering self-encouraging optimism about the future – "there's something good coming for you and me, something good coming there has to be" – in line with the final stage of the Grief Cycle, which must entail a resolution of differences and the renegotiation of a relationship.

"Bus to Tampa Bay," recorded in 2014 and released posthumously in 2018, echoes "Gainesville" in its theme of "restorative nostalgia" as Petty writes about the short period in his life when he was sent to Tampa by his parents to study at art school (Boym 41). Although an attempt by Earl to dissuade his son from a career in music, Petty did not "put up any resistance" because he was secretly dating a girl who lived in Tampa at the time (Zanes 43). In the song, Petty recalls waiting for the Greyhound bus from Gainesville to Tampa where he sees "hired hands" talking beneath the shade, a "lonely woman" who is a "prisoner" of her own dreams, and a map depicting the Seminole leader Osceola's fight against the genocide of Native Americans in Florida. Ato Quayson sees the bus station chronotype as a "symptom and a shaper of social relations within historical spatial configurations" (113). This song's lyrics create a clash of past and present as narrative events "take on flesh" and enable Petty to make amends (Bakhtin 243). Once in Tampa, Petty never attended classes and ended up drifting from job to job. He was also caught sneaking into his girlfriend's house late at night, fled in her father's car, and returned to Gainesville. The song, thus, brings closure to this stage in his life by serving as a form of apology to his parents, as well as to the girl and her father.

In 2016, Petty reunited once more with Mudcrutch to record Mudcrutch 2 – what would turn out to be his final studio album. Many of the lyrics again sought to reconcile Petty with his past. The album opener, for example, is "Trailer," the song that never made Southern Accents. As aforementioned, the trailer is used as a chronotope for a form of Southern life associated with poverty and rurality. Yet, here, the trailer is presented neutrally rather than critically as Petty delivers the lyrics with "the sonic equivalent of a shrug" rather than bitterness (Kot). The added third verse, which alludes to Petty's father, also contributes to this feeling as the protagonist sings that he "ain't cut out for workin'" and prefers to "get by on [his] own time." He seems resigned, "I can't find a thing, babe, that gives me an answer, that shines a light on the way things went." Re-recorded more than twenty years later, "Trailer," therefore, takes on a new meaning: Petty still may not understand his father's actions, but he now accepts them.

The most poignant track on Mudcrutch 2 is "I Forgive It All" in which Petty reflects on returning home after a long time. The song sees the recurrence of the road as chronotope, but, here, the protagonist is thrown into a nineteenth-century landscape as he arrives in town on a horse and asks somebody to take the animal "down to the water…to graze a while." The setting is more akin to Earl's birthplace in Georgia than Gainesville, which leads the listener to wonder whether the narrator's return home is in the mind rather than physical. Petty and his father may be separated by death, but they can still meet and engage in a process of self-discovery in a metaphysical space (see Hayward). Petty's lyrics address finally letting go of resentment for his father – "people are what people make 'em and that ain't gonna change…there ain't nothing you can do, nothing you could rearrange." Petty repeats the line “I forgive it all” throughout the song. The brief pause each time before adding "with her," in reference to Earl's treatment of his wife, emphasizes the rawness of Petty's emotions while the repetition of the same simple tune on the accompanying piano and rhythm guitar adds to this quasi-purification process. The ambiguity of "with her" could also be directed at Petty's ex-wife Jane, suggesting that, with time, he has also healed from the hurt that she caused him. The poignant music video features Anthony Hopkins and is shot in black and white, adding to the tristful mood. The video ends with Hopkins alone in a room cathartically shouting "I forgive" louder and louder until he finally breaks down.

Concluding Discussion:
"Square One"

Seven years after his death, Tom Petty was made a Doctor of Music by the University of Florida. At the graduation ceremony, School of Music director Kevin Orr stated that the university was privileged to celebrate not only Petty's "extraordinary achievements as an artist" but also "the ways in which his music has and continues to unite us as a community" (qtd. in Ferrier). This honor was the latest in a series of recognitions from his hometown, including the renaming of Northeast Park as Tom Petty Park, the official declaration of Tom Petty Day on 15 October, and the annual Tom Petty Weekend festival.

Early in his career, Petty had said that he felt "no identification with the South" and never related to the "Southern backwoods types" (Shapiro). However, by the end of his life, he admitted that Gainesville was a good place to grow up musically, and the competitive environment had made him a much stronger performer who could easily hold his own once in California. Petty admitted that much of his ambivalence towards the South stemmed from his upbringing and the difficult relationship with his father. Speaking to Zanes in 2015, Petty reflected on the challenges he faced throughout his life and how songwriting helped him deal with those emotions:

I was used to living in hell. My parents' marriage was hell, and I lived through that. I lived through being terribly abused as a kid, and then I found myself in an abusive marriage. But I managed to be somewhat optimistic, to see something ahead. I sometimes wonder if my career would have been more or less productive if it hadn't all gone that way, you know? Songs were a safe place to be. And I needed a safe place. So I went there a lot. (257-258)

Petty was always searching for something by revisiting the past in his lyrics, yet it would take his whole life to work out what exactly that something was. Through his music, he sought to process, negotiate, and ultimately come to terms with his upbringing and (non)relationship with his father, Earl. To do so, Petty drew on recurring chronotopes of the road and travel, idyllicism/folklore, thresholds, the suburbs, water, and dreams to deal with his grief. While early songs saw him protecting himself, they made way for the anger and resentment stage after his mother's death in 1980, which was channeled through Southern Accents. The backlash around the album's problematic focus and imagery then led to a bargaining, rejection, and reinvention phase during which Petty embraced his new California life while also exploring the complex myths and anti-myths of the Los Angeles music industry. This stage was followed by a period of deep depression after the breakdown of his marriage and the death of his father. During this period, Petty increasingly looked to his childhood with nostalgia – both restorative and reflective – in a bid to make sense of it. In his final decade, Petty finally found that something he had always been searching for: release, acceptance, forgiveness, closure, newfound love for his father and his hometown, and peace of mind. As he sang in 2006's "Square One," "it took a world of trouble, it took a world of tears, it took a long time to get back here." The Grief Cycle was complete at last.

In discussions of his music, Petty frequently challenged the label "Southern rock" ascribed to his music. He argued that TP&TH had more in common with the California sound. For Matt Ruby, however, there is a "secret" element to Petty's music that makes it distinctly Southern, and that is its connection to gospel music: "He wrote from the point of view of the losers, f--- ups, rebels, misfits, dropouts, and ones who only get a glimpse. But he understood most of us live for that glimpse, that occasional peek at the place where redemption lies." Like classic gospel songs, redemption lay at the heart of Petty's music. His characters – including himself – were flawed, yet they all wanted something more from life, to be set free, saved, and transformed into better people. This raw honesty makes Petty's lyrics authentic and relatable while also demonstrating why he is one of the greatest songwriters of the last century and why a reappraisal of his music is long overdue in order to elevate him into the same canon as Dylan and Springsteen.

Notes 

1. This journal article focuses exclusively on Tom Petty's work as a solo artist, as part of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and with Mudcrutch. Outside of its scope is Petty's other work, such as his collaboration with Johnny Cash, The Traveling Wilburys, and recordings on tribute albums for J.J. Cale and Hank Williams.

2. The lyrics on Petty's Wildflowers (1994) album – often regarded as his masterpiece – reflect his marital difficulties. Speaking to Zollo in 2005, Petty recalled a lightbulb moment when his therapist told him that he was singing to himself on the album – mustering the courage to leave Jane.  

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