Do you ever get that feeling that every famous person knows each other? It’s an obviously absurd notion, but then you hear a story like the one that helped to inspire one of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ most beloved songs, and you start to wonder.
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The song in question is “Listen to Her Heart,” and it emanated from Petty’s second-hand exposure to a somewhat shady shindig at the home of none other than Ike Turner. Here’s what went down, and how Petty turned it into a standout track.
When the Party Gets Out of Hand
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ debut album was still rising in popularity as 1977 turned into 1978, more than a year after it was released. The band still decided a new record needed to be made, if only because they were tired of playing the same songs over and over again in their live shows.
As a result, Petty wrote most of the band’s second album You’re Gonna Get It, which was released in May 1978, in the studio. But the band did have two finished songs they had already been playing live for some time they hadn’t yet recorded. They were “I Need to Know” and “Listen to Her Heart,” which, as it turned out, became the two singles released from the record.
In the case of “Listen to Her Heart,” Petty was inspired by an incident involving his first wife and Denny Cordell, the Heartbreakers’ record producer and label chief at the time. Petty explained the story to Paul Zollo in the book Conversations with Tom Petty:
“My ex-wife had gone with Cordell to Ike Turner’s house. And Ike Turner had locked them in the house. (Laughs) And there was a lot of cocaine and drugs around. When they told me this story, I thought it was really funny.”
Exploring the Lyrics to “Listen to Her Heart”
While the bizarre story might have amused Petty at the time, he took it and turned “Listen to Her Heart” into a serious song. It didn’t hurt that he created such energizing music for it, or that the Heartbreakers played it to the hilt, with a galloping rhythm and a Byrds-inspired 12-string guitar riff propelling the action.
The song begins with the striking lines: You think you’re gonna take her away / With your money and your cocaine. While there was no suggestion that Turner was seducing Jane Petty at the time, Tom let his imagination run wild a bit to create a relatable story. But his record label wasn’t crazy about the reference to cocaine, and they actually asked him to change the word to “champagne” instead, as he explained to Zollo:
“Yeah, the record company, they’re always sticking their nose in there. Of course we didn’t [make the change]. Because it would have made it a different song. I didn’t really see the character as caring about a price of a bottle of champagne. Cocaine was much more expensive.”
Petty’s idea for “Listen to Her Heart” was that the narrator steadfastly believes in his girl’s loyalty, even as this other guy tries to steal her affections. The guy is kidding himself: Buddy, you don’t even know her, the narrator sneers. That leads into Petty’s fantastically concise chorus, which says it all: She’s gonna listen to her heart / It’s gonna tell her what to do / She might need a lot of loving but she don’t need you.
“Listen to Her Heart” wasn’t the breakthrough hit it should have been for Petty. That would have to wait till the band’s next album, Damn the Torpedoes, went nuclear. In any case, the song remains a shining example of a master songwriter’s ability to turn the ridiculous into the sublime.
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