Petty’s Americana felt stranger than the rest

“My musical quest (is) to get more and more purity into the music.” That’s something Tom Petty told me over the telephone once. Years later, I wonder if he died — on Monday in California at age 66 — pushing that boulder uphill. Because it was always the impurity of Petty’s music that made it feel so sublime.

Even in ‘70s, when he was just a blond smirk in a black leather jacket, Petty’s brand of Americana already exuding its own mood, its own smell. As handsome as they were, his rock ‘n’ roll songs came coated in a residue of psychedelic strangeness. And they still glisten in the light.

Some of it had to do with Petty’s thing for electric guitars that jangled and wheezed, and the rest of it had to do with his voice — an unmistakable mewl that could sound vaguely sinister, gently pleading or stylishly aloof. His songbook seemed to move across the map like a vagrant weather system, fluctuating from heartland warmth to California cool to whatever dank vibes must have been hanging over Florida when Petty first marched his Heartbreakers out of Gainesville in 1976.

His songs were suited for ubiquity. They found their way to you. Maybe you first encountered his voice while hot-boxing to “Refugee” in the passenger seat of your buddy’s Camaro circa 1979. Maybe you found Petty loitering in Wonderland when the video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” landed on MTV in 1985. Maybe you heard “Free Fallin’” on the radio 10,000 times in the autumn of 1989. Or maybe you first heard 1976’s “American Girl” more recently, once boomer politicians made a habit of pumping it on the campaign trail. Which is all to say, we probably consider Petty’s music to be quintessentially American because it wafted so easily across so many different American moments.