Songwriters on Songwriting: Tom Petty
Singer-songwriter talks about how long he waited to write “The Waiting”.
I wrote my first song when I was 14 years old. Over the years, I’ve composed hundreds of songs. It was that interest — music — that led me to take a year off from pursuing a doctorate and led me down the circuitous path that has been the rest of my life.
I don’t write songs nowadays, more focused on screenplays and writing about writing. But I can’t help but think at least some of who I am as a writer derives from all that time studying and composing songs.
Which is why I say that one of my favorite ‘screenwriting’ books is “Songwriters on Songwriting,” a collection of interviews by Paul Zollo with some of the great songwriters of our time, from Mose Allison to Frank Zappa. For what are songs but stories?
Each day this week at this time, I will post insights from a songwriter about their craft in the hope their words may inspire us as writers.
Today: Tom Petty.
“The Waiting.”
I remember writing that one very well. That was a hard one. Went on for weeks. I got the chorus right away. And I had that guitar riff, that really good lick. Couldn’t get anything else. I had a really hard time. And I knew it was good, and it just went on endlessly. It was one of those where I really worked on it until I was too tired to go any longer. And I’d get right up and start again and spend the whole day to the point where other people in the house would complain. “You’ve been playing that lick for hours.” Very hard.
It came in piece by piece. First the chorus, which was pretty easy. And the verses took a long time, and the bridge even longer. I knew, when I had gotten that chorus, that I was definitely onto something very good. And I just couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out where to go with it. Eventually I did.
Here is Petty on video talking about “The Waiting” with an assist from Eddie Vedder at the end:
It seems like such a simple song, yet it took Petty all that time to find it. If there’s a more relevant lesson for screenwriters, I’ve yet to find it. I mean the damn song is called “The Waiting”. This is what we live with, working on our stories every day, waiting to get from FADE IN to FADE OUT. Sometimes it seems like we’ll never make it. But like Petty says… “Eventually I did.”
There’s another takeaway from Petty’s comments. When he was stuck, he kept coming back to that thing in the song that resonated with him, the opening chord progression. He knew there was something there. And he kept playing it, and playing it, and playing it.
So when we’re stuck or lost, zero in on that part of the story we know is strong, we believe works. Tune into that. Use that as a touchstone for everything else.
The waiting can be the hardest part. But if we keep at it… eventually we’ll get there.
Here is the original video for “The Waiting”:
Any Tom Petty fans out there?
