Tom Petty Wanted to Release a ‘Worst Of’ Album 

Tom Petty released a number of successful albums over the years. In the decades he was working, he received many awards and much acclaim. Still, his creative process with the Heartbreakers was not always seamless. He explained that they had many outtakes and songs that were never released to the public. Petty didn’t believe that these outtakes were necessarily bad and wanted to one day release a The Worst Of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album.

The Heartbreakers guitarist didn’t think musicians should take themselves too seriously

Petty had wanted to be a musician since he was a teenager, and he took his work seriously. Still, he didn’t think musicians should be too self-serious. 

“There’s nothing worse than a serious pop singer,” he told the Vancouver Sun in 1991.

He noted that taking the work too seriously can make an artist come across as pretentious.

“You can still say things while you’re lightening up,” he said. “But I think we’re all weary of people who come on for an entire LP … and give you the impression that this person is trying to tell you real serious things that they couldn’t possibly have an impact on. A lot of lyrics that I hear on the radio these days sound pompous. I’m not against people being serious with their work, I just think they have to be careful that it doesn’t come off as pretentious.”

Tom Petty wanted to release an album of his worst songs

Petty liked including spontaneous moments from the recording process on songs. These were some of Petty’s favorite parts of certain albums, and he said he would fire engineers if they missed meaningful moments. 

“We fire engineers for missing those moments on tape,” Petty told Musician in 1983, per The Petty Archives. “They only happen once. At the end of an album, we have rooms and rooms full of tape. Sometimes we sell it back to the studio and have them bulk-erase it. We really have to explore songs to find out what’s there, and that takes a lot of time [a year in studio rentals for Long After Dark at a cost of $400,000]. The band is almost too smart for its own good. That self-consciousness can take over, so you almost have to trick them onto the record.”

Not all of these moments were usable, however. On the album Long After Dark, the band ended up with a number of songs they couldn’t include on the record.

“We ended up with nineteen tracks, of which we used ten,” he said. “Someday I’d like to release The Worst Of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers with the outtakes. They’re all good songs, but they didn’t fit moodwise. Personally, I don’t care what comes next when I’m listening to music. I can go from Led Zeppelin to George Jones, but most people don’t like that kind of juxtaposition.”

Tom Petty did release a greatest hits album

Petty did not end up releasing a Worst Of album, but he did release the album Greatest Hits in 1993. The songs included on the record were classics like “American Girl,” “I Won’t Back Down,” and “Free Fallin’.”

They also released three new songs on the album, “Into the Great Wide Open,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and “Something in the Air.”