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I finally said to her, ‘You should quit.’ One day, she did.” “I had heard about this sort of thing, but had never experienced it firsthand. “She had a boss who couldn’t keep his hands off her,” Petty said. In his songwriting, Petty often dealt with the connection between freedom and emptiness, a balance evident in songs like “Free Fallin’” and “Into the Great Wide Open.” He gave those themes a different spin on a song for Echo titled “Free Girl Now.” The song, which addressed sexual harassment, was written for the girlfriend he met just after his divorce. It was an interesting observation, considering how much of Petty’s career hinged on consistency. You know every day where you’re going to be at 4 o’clock? Suddenly, that’s gone.”

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it was a challenge how to fill my days? I reflected on how orderly my life had been. Also, I thought it wouldn’t hurt us to vanish for a while. I’d put out so many records and toured 10 months behind Wildflowers. I had done so much in the five years before. “I took a year off for the first time since my 20s,” he explained. Petty spent an unusual amount of time at his home in Malibu during that era. He risked falling further by leaving his work schedule open right after the marital split. “The defiance is the part of me that’s trying to keep from sinking into oblivion,” Petty revealed. This explains why the album mixed melancholy with a defiance. I wanted to write about getting on with my life.” But I didn’t want to concentrate on that.

“I was still working a lot of the disappointment out. “I waited a year before I started writing,” Petty said. “I had to put my life back together.”Įven so, he didn’t want to create a “divorce album.” “It was a really hard thing,” Petty said that day. It was an uncommonly personal album, reflecting his divorce from his wife of 20 years, Janey Petty, a woman to whom he bore a physically resemblance, who was also the mother of his two daughters. Glimpses of it arose as soon as Petty began discussing the dramatic changes in his life and work that paved the way for the album we were there to discuss that day, 199’s Echo. Yet, in both his tone and music, an intensity lurked below the surface.

It was just the rumpled, everyday image you’d expect from one of rock’s most low-key but steady hitmakers. Petty’s hair wasn’t combed, his shirttail was untucked, and his jeans fit loosely. He moved slowly, measuring each gesture while mirroring those movements in spare and deliberate speech. That day, he ambled into the room like a cowboy who just spent too much time on his horse. The Tom Petty that fans imagine - a man of sincere ambition but modest demeanor - was just the man I met when I interviewed him for the first time at length, nearly two decades ago, for the New York Daily News.