In a conversation with Paul Zollo, Tom Petty blatantly described a moment that summed up his mentality during the late 90s, saying: “The Heartbreakers weren't doing anything. We had just done this long on-and-off tour for Wildflowers. I was not in a good head space, I won a Grammy then [in 1995 for Best Rock Vocal Performance], and didn't even go to the Grammys. I remember standing outside in the yard when the phone call came and said “You just won a Grammy.”
If Wildflowers was him recognizing his need for change, and Echo was the grappling of the effects, it would leave She’s The One was the eye of the storm. The soundtrack is already just an amalgamation of what was left off of Wildflowers, whose sessions proved to be so fruitful that an album's worth of songs were cut. There were a few new songs written for the album, but it was mainly a time of regrouping for a fractured band and their fragile frontman. It’s a bitter offering for a normally upbeat band, there’s something about the songs he chose to cover, what he chose to add from his back catalog to add to the album. Petty rarely talked about the album, except to comment on how he wished he didn’t waste good songs on a soundtrack to a movie no one saw. One song he said this specifically about was the opening track, Walls (Circus). It was one of the only songs on the album that Petty didn’t ignore completely after release, joining the canon of those “realistically positive” songs that would become synonymous with his image - in fact it was the very idea of the song.
Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks / Some doors are opened, some roads are blocked / Sundowns are golden then fade away are the lines that open the song, ones that explain all that needs to be said in many ways. There’s a certain track of the seven stages of grief that pass through Wildflowers, and to an extent Echo, that find their way seeped into some tracks on She’s the One. It’s this song that really lodges acceptance, though, accepting that the world cannot possibly exist without pain, in the way it cannot possibly exist with just positives. The chorus of the song alludes to this as well: You’ve got a heart so big, it could crush this town / But I can’t hold out forever, even walls fall down. There’s a certain admission in this song that peels back layers most songwriters wouldn’t dare to expose, that being trapped in your own delusional state fosters these moments of pain. All around your island, there’s a barricade / It keeps out the danger, but holds in the pain is the clearest Petty becomes on the topic, that the only way to change the pain that exists within your life is to move out of the comfortable state you allow yourself to lull into. Going back to the chorus, I can’t hold out forever is an interesting word choice, that even if life is good, there’s an underlying pain that has affected life much too long. The acceptance aspect comes from the lyrical ideas presented throughout the song: how the walls built once to protect peace and prevent change are now holding in the emotions they were once built to keep away. Accepting that Walls fall down is more than the Petty of Wildflowers could do. The one that was riddled with anxiety and could only relate freedom to being defensive of his choice or slipping into different characters and stories, yet now Walls fall down.
There’s something about Petty’s word choices as well, the acceptance that sometimes things just happen as life doesn’t play out as wanted sometimes. Sometimes you're happy, sometimes you cry / Half of me is ocean, half of me is sky and Some things are over, some things go on / Part of me you carry, part of me is gone are worded to their exact meanings pretty well: the idea that things don’t last, that there’s a ying to every yang, a cause to every effect. Petty was a master with his words, however simple they were, they told stories that could be so easily understood by anyone who heard them. He wasn’t how he described Dylan, a riddle wrapped in a question, and he wasn’t careless about how he wrote [take his Simpson’s cameo as that: he can’t write a meaningless song] - he remains for everyone. How no one had been through his exact circumstance, could never understand his isolation and pain, sitting with a matchbook of Elvis as he ate his TV dinner silently backstage of a concert thinking about the dissolution of his twenty year marriage, but they could understand the idea that part of a person is the same, yet most had changed, and that you can carry who you know and let go of who you don’t. Anyone could understand that, the words part of me you carry, part of me is gone.
She’s the One often fades into obscurity in the grand scheme of Tom Petty, give that it’s ties to an unremarkable movie, the fact Petty himself ignored it largely, or that most of the tracklist is now home within Wildflowers and All the Rest, but it’s better than most would give it credit for. It’s telling how little Petty appreciated some of his own work, how harsh he judged some of his music. It’s the sign of a great artist that even what they think of as horrible is leagues better than what they have worked up in their head, but there’s something even he couldn’t deny: that Walls was a standout in so many ways. It may never have garnered the worldwide critical acclaim of something like it’s predecessors but it fell into a great canon of Petty’s catalog, the one where some of his most reflective work lives. Where he bled over the page not for acclaim but for himself, and in a way it’s equally as impressive as a number one hit.
The music video for Walls (Circus) from 1996:
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