There must’ve been something in Mike Campbell’s water back in 1978, when the guitarist began writing “Here Comes My Girl” and “Refugee” during the same week.
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“I made some demos and Tom liked those two,” he explained decades later, during a 2003 interview with the website Songfacts. “‘Here Comes My Girl’ was interesting because we had the chorus and Tom wasn’t sure how to do the verse. He kept trying to sing it different ways, and he finally came across sort of half-talking it, and that’s when the song seemed to come to life.”
Not every singer is born with a show-stopping voice, and Tom Petty spent decades experimenting with different approaches to his job as the Heartbreakers’ frontman. He drawled like Dylan. He crooned like Roger McGuinn. He even sang “Breakdown” in a faux-Cuban accent. With “Here Comes My Girl,” he tried something different altogether, delivering each verse with a punky, street-smart swagger that had more in common with talking blues than traditional rock ‘n’ roll. It was a move that found him truly embodying the song’s narrator: a down-in-the-dumps man who’s been hardened by his own unhappiness.
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“This town just seems so hopeless,” Petty laments in the very first line. Behind him, Campbell shifts between guitar chords while bassist Ron Blair repeatedly plucks the same A note, physically rooting the song in one spot. There’s a feeling of tension there—a sense that the song, like its main character, is trapped in place. Petty’s lyrics offer little relief, with the frontman admitting, It seems I remember the good times were just a little bit more in focus.
Once he starts singing about his girl, though, both his spirit and his voice lift. When she puts her arms around me, I can somehow rise above it, he sings, jumping into his upper register. By the final moments of the pre-chorus, he’s so elated that he simply has to shout. When I got that little girl by my side, you know, I can tell the whole wide world to shove it, hey! he exclaims, and the chorus that follows is pure Byrds-inspired bliss, full of jangling guitar arpeggios and lush vocal harmonies. The downbeat of the chorus also marks the first time the Heartbreakers leave behind the tension of the verses and, instead, come together on a big, satisfying E chord. That moment is the song’s center—not just thematically, but tonally, too—and it turns “Here Comes My Girl” into a cinematic anthem.
The rest of the song follows that same pattern. Petty begins each verse with words of disillusionment. He doesn’t see the point of working hard every day when “nothin’ ever really seems to come from it.” He’s aimless, desperate to “reach out and grab hold of something.” He’s lost in his own thoughts, spending time “wondering, waiting, and worrying about some silly little things that don’t add up to nothin’.” Our boy is hurting, and there’s only one thing that stops the pain: his girl. Whenever he’s singing about her, the song feels lighter and brighter. She is all I need tonight, he sings during the end of each chorus, with Stan Lynch’s voice harmonizing above him.
Lyrically, “Here Comes My Girl” is Petty at his simplest. There’s no metaphor here. No symbolism. There’s just a man who’s desperate to see his beloved, and once he does, he can’t help but celebrate her arrival with a joyous chorus that could make the strings on Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker hum.
Songs like “Here Comes My Girl,” “Refugee,” and “Don’t Do Me Like That” helped turn Damn the Torpedoes into Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers‘ commercial breakthrough, with the album itself peaking at No. 2 in the U.S. Campbell would go on to become Petty’s right-hand man, co-producing the bulk of the Heartbreakers’ albums while co-writing songs like “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “You Wreck Me.”
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