Denial can be a powerful character trait to highlight in a song. A narrator who’s broken inside but is putting up a brave front makes for some fascinating emotional terrain. All the better when that terrain is covered by a top songwriter. Tom Petty delivered a beauty of a song with “It’ll All Work Out”. It arrived on his 1987 album Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). With a crucial musical assist from his Heartbreaker cohort Mike Campbell, Petty accessed some feelings that, as it turned out, probably hit a bit close to home at the time.
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“Work” Permit
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers decided to return to their old way of working on the 1987 album Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). They were making a course correction from Southern Accents, which had been released two years before. That was a record where Petty and company labored over arrangements and added more production extras than was customary for them.
As a result, they deliberately tried to keep Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) as raw and simplified as possible. In a few cases, the songs even sounded like they were fragmentary. The music charged ahead raucously and unpolished. Petty and his band bashed it into shape in the studios and didn’t fuss much with it.
However, “It’ll All Work Out” stood out as a bit of an exception. The gentle ballad required a bit of delicacy. Petty, who was undergoing some turbulence at the time in his marriage to his first wife, just couldn’t pull the focus he needed to make the track happen.
That’s when he handed it off to Mike Campbell and told him to work his magic with it. Campbell did wonders with the song on the musical side, rendering it full of delicate beauty. Combining that music with Petty’s pain-wracked lyrics creates a song that’s both lush and devastating all at once
Behind the Lyrics of “It’ll All Work Out”
Who knows if some of the trouble that Petty was experiencing in his marriage filtered its way into the lyrics of “It’ll All Work Out”? What’s clear is that the narrator’s continuous insistence that all will be well is in direct contrast to the evidence he presents in the rest of the song.
The narrator begins by recalling her beauty. “She wore faded jeans and soft black leather / She had eyes so blue they looked like weather.”
That’s when he suddenly reveals that he’s the cause of the heartache in the relationship: “When she needed me, I wasn’t around.”
There’s something damning about the way he shrugs it off: “That’s the way it goes, it’ll all work out.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s trying to convince himself or the girl with this assertion. “I was pledged to her for worse or better,” he explains, the marriage vows not toothless in the face of his behavior. “When it mattered most, I let her down.”
In the middle eight, the narrator clarifies how things will finally turn out for the best: “It’ll work out eventually / Maybe better with him than here with me.”
With her out of his life, he’s beset by ominous weather: “Now the wind is high and the rain is heavy / And the water’s rising in the levee.”
In the final lines, his façade of courage breaks, and he admits that he’ll miss her. “Still I think of her when the sun goes down / It never goes away, but it all works out.” His attempts to deny the pain in store for him ring hollow.
“It’ll All Work Out” is a wonderful melding of the musical strengths of Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, and it insists that the future can still turn out bright. But after one listen to Petty’s wounded, far-away vocals, we’ll know different.
Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns
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