Southern Accents

So then they flip direction.

They go to Southern Accents.

Let Me Up, I've Had Enough.

It starts to wobble a little bit.

Things are not, you know, the songs on Let Me Up, I've Had Enough, it's a bit of a reaction to Southern Accents in terms of the production was chaos.

So they wanted to simplify it.

They go into the studio and they play most of that album live off the floor with Tom calling out the changes live in the room, right? So that's a different way of doing it.

Why? Like, no, don't do this.

And he knows that I love the song and I love Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers especially.

I mean, she did Southern Accents.

And I guess that was on a Tom Petty tribute.

album but it was released as a single for Dolly and she crushed it

And Best of Everything is a great little story song, and I just think it's brilliantly written.

And I think maybe we talked about this when we did the Southern Accents.

You have

a problem with the horns or something, right?

that was initially, when it wasn't online, out of all five discs, it was the only one that wasn't, which is, again, because there are outtakes.

There's a couple of outtakes on disc five.

They've got some of those, like the Southern Accents session, a couple of covers, but... and the stuff on there, and Gator on the lawn, they've got some B-sides on this, which really, I'd love to know why that one was withheld.

I'm wondering if there's some sort of, I wonder if there's a rights issue with Kravitz, like a publication problem, or something like that could be, right? You know, who knows, but, or Wooden Heart, I mean, maybe they couldn't clear it with Elvis' estate, I don't know.

And that was certainly true in the 1980s.

So you open your book exploring three albums that defined the soundtrack of America at the beginning of the 1980s, which were Bruce Springsteen's The River, Damn the Torpedoes by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Against the Wind by Bob Seger.

And of those, Seger's album is worthy of notice because you write that his success with Against the Wind foretold the widespread appeal of Heartland Rock.

What about it resonated with listeners?

Her records were not supported by marketing in the same way that her male analogs were.

And, you know, that album that I just mentioned, Greenlight, is a perfect example of that.

Like, that album, to me, stands alongside the other Heartland Rock albums of the early 80s.

Yeah, it has, like, a few new wave touches, right? But so did Petty's albums, right? But because it was Bonnie and because she had inhabited these other forms in the 70s, the male-dominated rock music press...

But no, I think that please listen to her music.

Please, everyone, just there's so, there's six decades of great, great songs, and her covers of other people's work ha- Her cover of Tom Petty's Southern Accents that was on the, the tribute album a couple years ago was just gorgeous.

Better than Johnny Cash's cover of it.

So, you know, she, she became an ambassador for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and she created Shakanahe, the Land of Blue Smoke, using the phonetic rendering of the Cherokee name for the Smokies, Shakanahe.

Hello, podcast listeners.

Welcome back to Southern Accents, a podcast about Tom Petty.

I'm Jon.

I'm joined as always by Jared.

a lot of the people coming through are like the Wilburys who are friends of his and members of the Heartbreakers and just kind of people filtering in here and there rather than, okay, we're in the studio, we're getting the wrecking crew or whoever to come support you.

This is more of just like a very homespun project in a lot of respects, which is also why it's interesting that it's like the most kind of produced album of his it feels like at least to this point given how it's very much a homemade thing

we talked about you know how Campbell's writing style started with the Vitiac and the Tascam Porta Studio like in the early 80s and they kind of pioneered along with mccartney and some others this bedroom pop almost style of production and this seems like more of a continuation of that right they have this new digital technology that's been around for a little bit at this point and i'm talking about mainly like the effects but you know they have had this wave with parts of southern accents and parts of let me up i've had enough where they're just really leaning on these absurd like very 80s very late 80s uh effects and it doesn't turn out very well mostly but here it's a lot more tasteful if not you know if it is overproduced by like today's standards or to our ears having heard it for so long it's you know a lot of the individual choices are a lot more tasteful i would say

yeah

That's been the lifelong goal to write songs like that.

I think... uh, what song that surprisingly became one of my favorites doing that show was Southern accents, uh, which is, you know, not a real, uh, popular song of Tom's and I was in a big smash hit, but that, that second record of his didn't really do a whole lot, but, uh, We do that song on the encore every night, and I sing it a cappella, which is, again, something I've never done before, but we come out on stage.

You've seen the show, and singing that song with no music and just the words really drives home the... you know, kind of the longing that he had from losing his mother and that time in his life when growing up in California, I mean, sorry, in Florida.

And it really is a strong, strong song.