Full Moon Fever

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Roots Rock

• jangly
• anthemic
• heartland

About

Whether he was explicit about it or not, you got the sense that Tom Petty always wanted to carry the mantle of the classic-rock artists of the 1960s. So when Bob Dylan adopted the Heartbreakers as his opening act and backing band on a 1986 world tour, the sense wasn’t just of personal and professional validation, but of a historical continuum ensured: Here was one legend giving the nod to the next, seeing to it that rock should—and would—live another season. A year later, on tour in London, Petty got a birthday visit from Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and others just as hurricane-force winds settled onto the coast: A cataclysm, yes, but for Petty, who had lost his home to arson earlier in the year, the biblical signs of a new beginning. A solo album mostly in name and spirit (the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell can be heard throughout, and there are also contributions from Benmont Tench and Howie Epstein), 1989’s <i>Full Moon Fever</i> reestablished Petty as an inescapable presence on radio and MTV, thanks to back-to-back-to-back hits “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and “Free Fallin’.” But it also gave new angles and fresh paint to a now-familiar sound. When it came to the studio, the Heartbreakers had always been realists, a live band who treated recording equipment as tools to capture, not conjure. <i>Full Moon Fever</i> producer Jeff Lynne—who’d crafted FM magic with Electric Light Orchestra, and who’d help fine-tune Harrison’s sounds for the 1980s—was, by contrast, a stylist: The playing mattered to Lynne, of course, but it was always second to the sound, texture, and character of the recording. Nowadays, <i>Full Moon Fever</i> sounds unmistakably like a late-1980s album. But as slick as the record gets at times, its creation (and subsequent multi-platinum success) prevented Petty from treading too close to the rusticism of neo-traditionalism, at a time when it would have been easy for him. Pair it with <i>The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1</i>—his collaborative album with Dylan, Harrison, Lynne, and Roy Orbison, and arguably the most enjoyable big-ticket goof in rock history—and you can almost feel the wind of a great hand as it takes the chip off Petty’s shoulder.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits