I love the song 'Blue Sunday'. There are great details in the lyrics, like "Her backseat could have been a hotel / I slept for a thousand years / every now and then she'd laugh out loud / I pretended not to hear.."
Yeah, that's kind of a story song. It's kind of a little short movie, that one.
Do you enjoy writing story songs?
Sometimes, yeah. If I'm lucky. They're hard to come by. "Something Big", on Hard Promises, which we've spoken about, is the same kind of thing, it's just a quick short story. 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. It's a lot trickier than writing a whole story out, like a narrative. So I don't usually set out to do that, but when it starts to happen, it's a lot of fun to follow it down the road and see where it goes.
And it's more a sense of following it than leading it?
I think so. With me, most of those come in and I am literally following it and writing it down. I don't really know the ending, and then the ending appears before me.
A lot of novelists have said they write their books that way, following the story, but unsure where it's going to end up.
I have to. I don't think I've ever written one where I knew how it was going to end up. So the endings are kind of ambiguous. But I think in song it's got to be. You don't want to nail it down too much. In songwriting, I think the better ones have some element of ambiguity, where it allows the listener to create his own picture. And those are the ones I like.

(Paul Zollo, "Conversations with Tom Petty", aus: Chapter 16: the last DJ, 2005)

Wen wundert's da noch, daß mir die ganzen musiktechnischen Besonderheiten seiner Songs, über die die beiden sich seitenlang in diesem Buch auslassen, beim anhören kaum jemals richtig bewußt geworden sind, aber ich dafür viele von Tom Pettys Songtexten - und gerade die der "Story Songs" - praktisch auswendig mitsingen kann? Mich nicht. Von Musik verstehe ich nunmal wenig. Aber doch einiges von Stories ...