Story songs can trip up the best of them. To quote a Bob Seger classic, it’s all about “what to leave in, what to leave out.” Tip the scales too far in one direction, and the whole enterprise can crumble on itself.
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Tom Petty knew the pitfalls of story songs, which is why he didn’t attempt them too often. But he delivered a fantastic one in “Something Big”, a 1981 cut from his classic album Hard Promises.
“Big” Doings
Hard Promises solidified the major leap that Tom Petty made with the album’s predecessor, Damn The Torpedoes. On those albums, Petty and The Heartbreakers, in conjunction with producer Jimmy Iovine, consistently found ways to combine trenchant songwriting with sharp, radio-friendly arrangements.
While the hits all shine brightly, what makes those albums so special, and you can say this for just about every LP in Tom Petty’s catalog, is the consistency. Take a spin through the non-singles, and you’ll find that they’re often just as compelling as the hits, if maybe a bit more off the beaten path.
“Something Big” found Petty telling a film noir-style story in just three verses and a chorus. In the book Conversations With Tom Petty, he explained to author Paul Zollo both the obstacles of writing such a story and what needs to be done to overcome them:
“And the trouble with them in songs is you don’t have a lot of space to get it in. So you’ve got to be lucky enough to get the lyric where it hits, and it has a pretty wide scope, where maybe one line can create multiple images in a person’s head. And that way, you can kind of squeeze a movie into three minutes.”
Examining the Lyrics of “Something Big”
“Something Big” doesn’t spoon-feed you any type of clear story. As a matter of fact, if you asked ten different listeners, you might get ten different interpretations of what’s happening. What’s important is the tense mood that Petty evokes and how the observations in the chorus help to elucidate the action in the verses.
“It didn’t feel like Sunday, didn’t feel like June,” Petty begins. It’s the kind of opening line you might expect from Raymond Chandler, which makes sense because he seems to be telling a story of a petty crime. The protagonist needs a collaborator for his unknown plan. He meets up with a “silent partner” in a room above the “plaza all-adult.”
“And he was not looking for romance, just someone he could trust.”
In the second verse, we find out the name of this character, assuming it’s the same guy we met in the opening stanza. (Petty doesn’t specify). He’s in a hotel room looking for alcohol, likely to steel himself for some escapade. His last request is for “an outside line,” and we can assume he’s ready to make his move.
Petty then makes the bold choice to skip over the main event to which the song has been building. Instead, we’re transported to the following day, when hotel maids come upon the scene. Has Speedball met his fate in that room? Again, that’s up for debate. In any case, one maid’s derisive commentary tears his plan to cinders: “It’s probably just another clown working on something big.”
In the chorus, we find out the motivation, which seems to be an existence lacking any kind of spark or potential. “And it wasn’t no way to carry on / It wasn’t no way to live.” With “Something Big”, Tom Petty proved he could tackle story songs, as challenging as they might be, with the cleverness and grace with which he handled just about every other songwriting task.
Photo by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock
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