Tom Petty Admitted He Did Something ‘Dumb’ While Writing a Song for Stevie Nicks
Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks were some of the biggest artists of their generation. They were also big fans of one another. Nicks, in particular, was a massive fan of Petty and the Heartbreakers, and she desperately wanted them to write her a song. Petty finally agreed, but he said he made an error in the writing process.
Tom Petty admitted he made a mistake when trying to write a song for Stevie Nicks
When Nicks and Petty met, she made it clear that she wanted him to write her a song. Nicks wrote most of her own songs, but she was willing to make an exception for Petty.
“She was this absolutely stoned-gone huge fan,” Petty told American Songwriter (via Guitar Player). “And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song.”
Petty got to work writing a song he thought sounded like Nicks and ended up with “Insider.” Unfortunately for him, he loved the song so much that he couldn’t give it up. He felt bad enough that he wrote her a different song, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” She was happy with it because it sounded less like something she wrote herself. Petty realized he’d made a mistake in trying to emulate her sound with “Insider.”
“She says, ‘Wow! That’s why I wanted you to write me a song — it’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s what you do,’” he said. “‘Insider’ sounds like what I do.’ And I thought, How dumb of me to think that she’d want me to write like her.”
They performed both songs as duets.
Stevie Nicks wanted to be like Tom Petty
Nicks fell in love with Petty’s music from the moment she heard it. She was already in Fleetwood Mac, a massively successful group, but she said she would have jumped ship to play with Petty if he’d taken her.
“After I joined Fleetwood Mac, I started hearing Tom Petty on the radio,” Nicks said in the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes. “And I just fell in love with his music and his band. I would laughingly say to anyone that if I ever got to know Tom Petty and could worm my way into his good graces, if he were ever to ask me to leave Fleetwood Mac and join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I’d probably do it. And that was before I even met him.”
When she started working on her solo album, she told producer Jimmy Iovine that she wanted to sound as much like Petty as possible.
“We talked a lot about Tom Petty,” she said. “I said, ‘Really, you know, I want to be the girl Tom Petty.’”
He later encouraged her to write
Nicks encouraged Petty to write a song for her solo album. He later encouraged her to do the same thing. In the mid-’90s, Nicks had recently left rehab and worried that her songwriting wouldn’t be the same. She decided to ask Petty for help.
“I was at my house in Phoenix — I had come out of rehab — and I had dinner with him at the Ritz-Carlton,” she told Rolling Stone. “I had a visitation from an old boyfriend, right after my rehab, and it had shaken me. I asked Tom if he would help me write a song.”
Petty refused. Instead, he told her she needed to throw herself into writing to regain her confidence.
“He said, ‘No. You are one of the premier songwriters of all time. You don’t need me to write a song for you,’” she explained. “He said, ‘Just go to your piano and write a good song. You can do that.’”
She wrote the song “Hard Advice” about this conversation.
