Most songwriters could toil for the rest of their lives and not come up with something as casually affecting as Tom Petty’s “Swingin’”. What does it say about Petty’s talent level that he pretty much made up the song on the spot?
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Perhaps because of how it arrived to him out of nowhere, Petty held a special space in his heart for the 1999 song. It teaches a good lesson to songwriters. Sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the way and let your muse do the talking.
Adlibbing a Winner
After the album was released, Tom Petty struggled to disassociate the 1999 album Echo from the trauma he was undergoing while making it. Petty separated from his first wife around that time. He felt afterward that the album was somehow too personal for public consumption. Truth be told, some of us love that aspect of it.
In any case, “Swingin’” steered clear from any of Petty’s angst, unless there was something subconscious coming to the fore. Petty and his band were planning on using their studio time one day to possibly redo their recording of “Free Girl Now”. They worried their original take of that song was a bit too ramshackle.
But Petty and his band didn’t show a lot of enthusiasm for the task at hand. Instead, as the band was plugging in and Petty could hear the feedback of the other instruments in his ears, he started plunking away at some guitar chords. Little by little, the rest of the band fell in behind him.
Off the top of his head, Petty began shouting out the lyrics to a song that he was ad-libbing on the fly. Those adlibs included the various music stars (including Benny Goodman, Sammy Davis, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller) and one noted pugilist (Sonny Liston) who also “went down swingin’.” That put them in the same boat as the song’s protagonist.
Examining the Lyrics of “Swingin’”
Petty concocted a story of a girl who takes to the road to escape what we can assume is a dead-end life at home. She trusts her fate to the whims of chance and the kindness of strangers. All along, she embodies the resilience that characterizes many of the other folks who populate Petty’s songs.
This girl isn’t settling for small victories once she makes up her mind to go. “Gonna hitchhike to the yellow moon,” is her intent. While some might see the guy in the Cadillac as a potential problem, she sees opportunity. “Yeah, that’s when it happened,” Petty sings. “The world caught fire that day.”
In the second verse, Petty fills in some of the details. That includes the fact that she’s been incentivized to hit the road because of “trouble with the law.” There’s something telling in the fact that she goes to her mother-in-law for help. (Why not her husband?) And she hints at other escapades in the past. “After that night in Vegas / And the hell that we went through.”
In the final verse, we find out how far she’s made it (“’cross the Georgia line”) and that she’s finally found some happiness. “It had to come in time,” she sighs. “She said, ‘At last I’m free,” Petty sings. “’I wish Ma could see me now / She’d be so proud of me.’” It’s hard to say if it’s sadness or spite coming to the fore at that moment. But we know that she’s the author of her own fate, good or bad,
The road finally gives this wayward soul the peace and redemption that she craves. “Swingin’” offers us one of the most unforgettable character sketches in the Tom Petty canon. Pretty impressive, considering that character was made up on the spot.
Photo by Jeff Gentner/Getty Images
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