The 20 Greatest Tom Petty Songs
Ask your average wannabe rock star whose career they’d most want to trade with, and they’ll say Tom Petty. If they’re smart, anyway.
By Andrew Unterberger
It might not be the most obvious pick, since at no point in his life was Tom Petty ever the biggest rock star, nor the most iconic, the most acclaimed, the most influential or the most ostentatious. Rather, his was a career you could take home to Mom: Relatively void of dizzying highs or petrifying lows, but dependable and rock-solid, liked and respected by nearly all and vilified by precious few.
Petty released 10 albums between 1976 and 1999 and all of them were at least certified gold; his most recent album, 2014’s Hypnotic Eye, was the first Billboard 200-topper of his career. He came up on ’70s FM but still thrived in the ’80s and ’90s on MTV; he sold out arena shows until the day he died. (OK, until 11 days before the day he died. Still pretty good.) His life may not have always been as frictionless as his catalog — he even kinda warned against assuming that it was in one of his biggest hits — but his music never soured, and neither did his fans; Tom Petty’s ultimate legacy may be as proof that adult affability could be as magnetic a rock-star quality as animal charisma.
