Southern Accents

About

What does it mean to come from a place that some people treat as a joke? Despite Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Floridian heritage, the group had never traded on its Southern roots—at least not in the way that, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers had done early in their career. If anything, Petty’s ability to distill the universality of rock ’n’ roll—that yearning, that rebellion—is part of what made him and the Heartbreakers so successful in the first place. Not just as a band, but as ambassadors of an idealized America—one unbroken by North and South, rich and poor, and so on. But by the mid-1980, after a break from nearly a decade’s worth of touring and recording, Petty had some time to reflect on the life he’d left behind in Florida. Parts of <i>Southern Accents</i> are explicit: the billboard-sized “born in Dixie” chants of “Rebel,” the homily of “Southern Accents”—you don’t have to stretch too hard to figure out what’s on Petty’s mind. But the South, in Petty’s term, is also a metaphor for pride, stubbornne, and self-reliance—traits that had played a big role in Petty’s early-1980s scraps with the record industry. That Southern determination can be menacing, too, as evidenced by the dark “Don’t Come Around Here No More”—an anachronistically synthy track written and produced with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics (it became one of Petty’s biggest 1980s hit, thanks in part to its devilishly clever video). .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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