How the Agony of Romantic Anticipation—and Janis Joplin—Influenced the Meaning Behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “The Waiting”

It seems fitting that “The Waiting,” Tom Petty‘s classic song about romantic anticipation, took the songwriter many weeks to finish. 

Everything began with the song’s classic intro, which Petty wrote on acoustic guitar. “I wanted something that had a little lick from the beginning,” he explains in Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream, strumming the chord progression to illustrate his point. “I did that for weeks…and then, finally, I hit, The waiting is the hardest part / Every day, you get one more yard / You take it on faith, you take it to the heart / The waiting is the hardest part. I’d get to that, and then I’d go, ‘Now what?’ You eat dinner, you come back, sit down, pick up the guitar. People start banging on the wall. ‘Don’t play that anymore!’”

Neighbors be damned, Petty eventually came up with the song’s first verse. Oh baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now? he sings during the opening line, laying the groundwork for a verse that explores the elation of a romantic relationship. Our narrator is in love, and he’s singing directly to his partner, reveling in the sheer joy of their partnership.

Being together feels “like something from a dream.” It’s unprecedented. I’ve never known something quite like this, he admits. By the verse’s end, he seems to run out of words altogether. Yeah, yeah! he exclaims, and those words are repeated by his bandmates in one of the best call-and-response moments of the Heartbreakers’ entire catalog (and there’s a lot of ’em). It’s a moment that begs the listener to sing along, and that’s what thousands of fans did at every Tom Petty show thereafter. Petty often wrote universally relatable songs, but “The Waiting” was one of the few to directly involve the audience during each performance. 

[RELATED: The Meaning Behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Left-Field Ode to an ’80s Icon, “Don’t Come Around Here No More”]

The second verse treads similar territory. Petty admits to his horn-dog past—Well, yeah, I might have chased a couple women around, he sings with a nearly-audible shrug of his shoulders—but he doubles down on heartfelt commitment, too. Baby, you’re the only one that’s ever known how to make me wanna live like I wanna live, he admits. And then, after another round of “yeah yeahs,” he launches back into the song’s iconic chorus. 

If the verses of “The Waiting” are about the exhilaration of falling in love, then the choruses are about the long, lingering lull between meet-ups. When you’re dying to see somebody again, the waiting is, indeed, the hardest part. Most songwriters would probably flip that structure, filling the verses with anticipatory lyrics and saving the big, romantic pay-off for the chorus. Petty does the opposite, though, turning the chorus into a moment of longing rather than loving. But he’s such a melodic songwriter that the chorus still feels cathartic.

More than a decade before the song’s release, Janis Joplin famously said, “I love being onstage, and everything else is just waiting.” Petty credits her for inspiring the song’s refrain, even though another rock and roll legend takes credit, too. “[Roger] McGuinn swears that he said it to me,” he told Paul Zollo in the book Conversations with Tom Petty. “Maybe he did. I don’t think so. I think I got it from the Janis Joplin quote. That’s where it stuck in my mind. I don’t think she said, ‘The waiting is the hardest part,’ but it was something to that effect. ‘Everything else is just waiting.’ And so that’s where that came from.”

Petty put Joplin’s inspiration to good use. “The Waiting” reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Rock Top Tracks in 1984, becoming one of the first songs to top the newly-created chart. It remained a staple of the Heartbreakers’ live show for decades. Looking back on its creation, Petty didn’t seem to mind what he called a “long, drawn-out process.” Talking to Zollo, he explained, “I had a really good chorus, and I had to work backwards from the chorus. So that’s always hard. But I was really determined that I was going to get it. And I got it. It just took me a long time. It took weeks of working on it.” Turns out all the waiting was worth it. 

Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame