The Agonizing Lyric That May Have Hit Too Close to Home for Tom Petty

Tom Petty possessed a knack for writing songs that appealed to a wide range of listeners. He often achieved that by delivering his narratives from the perspective of characters outside himself that he seamlessly inhabited.

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When he wrote from a nakedly autobiographical standpoint on the album Echo, he felt a bit uncomfortable with how it all came out. From our standpoint, however, searing songs like the title track hit home with power and intensity.

Petty’s Pain

Despite being at a point in his career when most artists start to tail off in terms of their artistic excellence, Tom Petty was peaking throughout the 90s. Albums like Into The Great Wide Open and Wildflowers featured some of his finest writing and uniformly excellent performances by the Heartbreakers.

But Petty was struggling a bit on a personal front by the end of the decade. His first marriage was crumbling at the time that he was writing the songs that would end up on Echo in 1999. Songs of an extremely personal nature came pouring forth, a style that wasn’t all that common to Petty.

For a while after its release, Petty judged Echo somewhat harshly. Perhaps it’s because it was such a painful album to make. Many Petty fans now consider it to be among his best work, a raw, confessional record that served its cathartic purpose for both artist and audience.

The title track acted as perhaps the biggest departure from the Petty norm. Long known for his succinct lyrical approach and adherence to the traditional pop-rock format, he allows “Echo” to sprawl over six-and-a-half minutes and five verses. Petty sings the song with his voice sometimes shaking with emotion, which suggests there’s little to no separation between himself and the narrator.

Examining the Lyrics of “Echo” by Tom Petty

Perhaps the best comparison for “Echo” is Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”. That’s another lengthy track that weaves all over the place in terms of the narrative, at times embittered and at times conciliatory. But at the core of both songs are bottomless wells of heartbreak.

“They say, one day, you’ll look up and laugh,” Petty sings at the end of the first verse of “Echo.” The remainder of the song makes clear that he won’t be finding humor in any of this anytime soon. At times during the song, he speaks to the person he’s addressing as if they’re still together. That includes the second verse, where he promises to “worship you like gold.”

He sings about intense moments spent together, and he implies that there might never again be a time he feels that strongly. “Yes and in another world, nothing was like this,” Petty moans. “There may have been a girl, there never was a kiss.”

In the final two verses, the mood changes to one of desperate frustration. Petty sings of losing trust and then gets accusatory in the end. “And I don’t want to mean anything to you,” he sings. “And I don’t want to tempt you to be true.” He’s trying to cut loose once and for all, as painful as that eventuality sounds.

The choruses are much more reserved than the verses, Petty singing about the title phenomenon with equanimity and resignation. “Echo” rides an emotional rollercoaster, one perhaps too harrowing for the song’s creator to want to relive.

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