S8E16 A Mind With a Heart Of Its Own

Transcript

(* Note - the transcript is as-written before recording. I usually change a few sentences or words here and there on the hoof as I'm speaking.)

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, my fine friends. Welcome to episode sixteen of season eight of the Tom Petty Project Podcast! I am your host, Kevin Brown. This is the weekly podcast that digs into the entire Tom Petty catalog song by song, album by album and includes conversations with musicians, fans, and people connected with Tom along the way. 

Some quick social media stuff before we dig into this week’s song. The Twitter polls seem to be picking up a little bit and this week it was a surprisingly even split in terms of how you all rated Alright For Now. 27% rated it between a 1 and a 6, 45.5% went with a 7-9, and a further 27.3% rated it a top-score 10 out of 10. Wil Porteous from Wildflower Records said “Love this track so so much. Defo could feel this being on Wildflowers. It’s got that close to the mic deeply personal edge that Tom is so seminal at doing.” and I agreed that it’s one of those songs in the catalogue where you really feel like you’re justin sitting across the coffee table from Tom and listening to him strum. @AmericanGirl said that it’s the “First song I sang both of my children when they were born. This song will always be gold.” So that’s a pretty strong emotional attachment! The Time Shifters Podcast and Orphaned Entertainment commented that “I’ve always loved this song. It feels so personal and sounds so lovely. It’s a real gem hidden among so many other gems.” Friend of the podcast (and future guest at some point) Bob Reidy commented “7 because it’s a short song. I like it but it’s not one that I am excited for. I always enjoy your analysis and your commentary. The first 8 songs on this album are the best.” and I can see where he’s coming. It was a short episode last week primarily because the song itself is so short and so simple. And I love this comment from JP Koffman, who says “8. How he pulls off being such a cool rocker and puts out such unabashed cheesy heartfelt lullabies that the same rockers (like me) love of is nothing short of genius. The guy could sing with Millie Vanillie and I would just think they are cool now and Tom stays unblemished.” I can only imagine Tom’s horror when, or maybe if, he heard about the whole Millie Vanilli fiasco! Or about modern rock bands playing to backing tracks instead of playing live! I’m sure that top lip would be have been curled up into snarl as he considered the idea! Mary Beth Donnolly said “I just love this song. It’s like medicine, very healing. So sweet and yet, not syrupy sweet but sincere. I didn’t really think of this song until my kids were well past infancy, but I sure wish I’d sung it to them. I love funny Tom and surly Tom, but love love love sweet Tom - his voice here gives me a lump in my throat.” I couldn’t agree more Mary Beth - it’s that thing I’ve talked about where Tom sometimes doesn’t put any performative affectation at all on his vocal so you just hear his fully natural voice! Last but by no means least, my pal Pete Nestor from the Honest and Unmerciful Record review podcast says “….for now” is absolutely deliberate. That’s a great observation. He could have said “……my dear” or filled it with a guitar lick or some other kind of instrumentation. But “for now” really just hits a perfectly unsettled and unresolved “waiting for the other shoe to drop” vibe!” and I love that I’m not the only one who picked up on that line! I’m probably just really late to that particular party!

OK, that’s enough social media for now. Today’s episode covers the penultimate track from side two of Full Moon Fever, A Mind With a Heart Of Its Own. Incredible that we’re at this point as this marks the half way point, in terms of albums, in Tom’s career as a solo artist and with the Heartbreakers. Of course I still have Mudcrutch and The Wilburys to go after this as well as all the unreleased tracks that came out on boxsets and b-sides etc. So I’m a long, long way away from running out of things to talk about! If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I don’t play any of the music from the song in the episode itself in order to avoid things like copyright issues or getting on the wrong side of the Petty estate. If you want to give the song a listen before we dig into it, there’s a link in the episode notes!

Hands up everyone who remembers listening to AM radio in their cars back when you were young! Well, this song has its roots in that particular pastime. As Tom tells author Paul Zollo in Conversations With Tom Petty, “Jeff and I were both in two cars driving to the studio, we used to listen to this AM station playing oldies. I heard Connie Francis singing “My Heart Has a Mind of its Own”. I got out of the car and I said “Did you hear that Connie Francis thing?” He said “Yeah I just heard that. But what if you sand that the other way? Then it means an entirely different thing.” What a marvelous way to be inspired, by simple considering the meaning of a phrase that just inverts the nouns to give an entirely different perspective. Tom goes on to say “I kind of put that in the back of mind and then the next day I came up with this Bo Diddley idea and then we knocked it out pretty fast.” Now, I always assume that people know what the Bo Diddley beat is, but maybe you don’t. Well, here’s what it sounds like [play clip of Bo Diddley here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unKL1EKIfK4] That’s the intro Bo Diddley’s self-titled song, Bo Diddley, performed live in 1999, 44 years after it was originally recorded. 

You might recognize that beat as it’s the basis for the very last song on the very first album that Tom and the Heartbreakers recorded; American Girl. The other place you might know this rhythm from is George Michael’s megahit, Faith. That chug a chug a chug a chug-chug has been around for a long time boys and girls and Tom leans right into it in this song. I love how heavy the opening of this song sounds. That opening slide from Mike sounds more like Aerosmith or Van Halen than it does Bo Diddley, but it’s just a little rope-a-dope to set up that great beat. Again, there’s a ton of guitar here, with Tom’s acoustic plus an electric - and I’d be willing to bet it’s a telecaster, providing the Diddley! You then get at least two other guitar parts sitting underneath that, with Mike adding some more slide and then a single bass-y slide up on the fourth beat of the bar. You then hear another part, panned slightly right, that is playing some bright broken chords. So, so much guitar here! And really, there wouldn’t need to be as this is a revved up blues song that doesn’t need to be so dense, but on this record, Jeff Lynne pulled out all the stops! 

The chord progression through the first verse is a really simple A - A - A - G - D. In the chorus, the progression is the same, A-G-D, but played on the 1-2-3 in straight time. The chords here are also full and open, as opposed to stacatto and muted and it provides that dynamic change in this section of the song. You still have that acoustic playing double time in the background, but now the guitars are more in the jangly sort of place. That 1-2-3 beat timing and the big open chords would be revisited four years later on the wildly popular You Wreck Me. You could almost imagine the latter being played over top of the Bo Diddley beat for a few bars in the middle in concert. It also shares some melodic kinship with Hurt from the Heartbreakers second album, so these little through lines and things that surface from time to time are always cool to think about. The chorus simply repeated the title lone, A mind with a heart of its own, with the harmonies added on the words “mind” and “heart of its own”. These are very full harmonies and I’m guessing both Jeff and Tom doubled each others harmonies, to get that richness. The harmonies here are also dialed back in the mix a little and it gives the chorus a feel of almost a 60s R&B song. So all those early influences that Tom is leaning into rhythmically are bleeding over into other parts of the song. There’s a nice little trick at the end of the chorus though. The first two passes through the progression are simply “A mind, with a heart of its own”, then we have a vocalized third pass, doot doo doot, doot doo doot before the A chord is switched to an A minor to provide a little tension coming back out of this section. These chords are also left to ring and the drums drop out for the last bar.

We’ve talked a fair bit about programmed drums on this record but to my ear, this sounds 100% acoustic in the tubs department. There’s a richness and a resonance to the snare that you simply don’t get in 1989 from a drum sample. There is also a shaker being played throughout the track on the 16th notes, that’s mixed really nicely so that it just fills out that very simple two-step backbeat that Phil Jones is playing.

Heading into the second verse, we get more slide guitar from Mike Campbell and we plunge headlong back into that great beat. A little addition to this section is the synth pad that sweeps up from the words “hurricane business”. For those of you who listen to the podcast regularly, you’ll notice that I almost always leave the lyrics until close to the end. I don’t know why, it’s just a habit I fell into. But I think this is a good time to say that this is a classic piece of whimsical, tapestry weaving from Tom. He’s not telling a specific story, just throwing a whole lot of characters out onto the streets of the song and let them run amok in the groove. “Well the man out to end us had a hurricane business He'd raise them from babies all by his self”. This is where I think you really feel the Bob Dylan slash John Lennon influence, in turn taking its cue from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. What on earth is a hurricane business and how does one raise hurricanes from babies? What are baby hurricanes call? Juvicans? Hurricescents? It doesn’t matter because the imagery is fun and funny. After this, we find out that the Hurricane daddy has an account that had “become surrounded”, by what we don’t know, but he drank up the part and everyone left. Absolutely brilliant. And starkly contrasted with the more real-world vignette of the girl in the field watching the men with the tall hats and coat-tails. There’s a great line, possibly the best in the song in the third verse but let’s wait until we get there.

The second chorus tuns through in identical fashion to the first, closing on the minor and the hung chord to lead straight back into the third verse, which was completely improvised on the spot. When Paul Zollo comments that “Sometimes songs seem to just fall together for you, if you’re in the right place” and Tom says “Well that one did. Because I had a couple of verses but I couldn’t come up with the third one. So Jeff just said “Come out and do the ones you’ve got. When it came to the third one, I just threw that in.” And again, it’s such a Dylanesque bit of throwaway silliness but it’s just delightful. I love the tongue in cheek setup of the first half of the verse. “Well I’ve been to Brooker and I’ve been to Micanopy.” It’s just hilarious to me that someone is bragging about having visited a town of 300 people and a town of 650 before going on to mention, almost as an afterthought, that he’s also been to the sprawling metropolis of St. Louis before closing out with “I’ve been all round the world.” I did a bit of Googling and learned that Micanopy is 17 minutes from Gainesville by car. Brooker is another 7 minutes, all the way in Bradford county rather than Alachua but hardly the other end of the state, never mind the world. Now, St. Louis is 13 hours drive in fairness, but the idea of ending that line with “I’ve been all round the world” after staying with four states of home is just incredibly funny. And the verse gets better from here! “I’ve been over to your house and you’ve been over sometimes to my house”. There’s no way you’d ever actually sit and write that that way. If you were writing that, or revising and working on the line, you’d almost certainly, or most people would almost certainly drop the word “sometimes”, or place it differently, but with it being ad libbed you get it the way that people actually talk rather than write, which just gives it bags and bags of charm. And we’re still not done, the real kicker is the last line of this last verse. “I’ve slept in your treehouse, my middle name is Earl”. Just utterly glorious. It tells the tale of a close relationship on the one hand and then you get this weird bit of nomenclature (do the English and American version) out of the blue. I just love it. Especially the way he really drawls that middle name out. He’s clearly just having a blast with this lyric and thank goodness they just ran with it and didn’t go back to find something different. I do wonder whether the friend who’s treehouse he’s slept in is the same girl from the opening verse. There’s almost a Forrest and Jenny vibe to it if you link those two verses. “She never looked different but something would change” is later in the timeline, and the treehouse reference snaps you back to a more innocent time.  I know that this isn’t the case because the third verse is ad-libbed, but hey, it’s fun to paint your own pictures on the canvas that Tom provides sometimes so I’m going with it!

Alright folks, It’s time for some Petty Trivia! 

Your question from last week was this: Which is the only song performed by the Heartbreakers that was co written by Tom and Benmont Tench? Is it a) Welcome To Hell, b) Melinda, c) Sins of My Youth, or d) Dreamville.

The answer is…. b) Melinda. Melinda is one of those strange tracks in the Tom Petty catalogue, like Black Leather Woman, or Dog on The Run, that we only have live performances of rather than a studio recording. Oh those three though, Melinda was played fairly frequently between 2003 and 2013 and is a song that is well-loved by fans as a result of its inclusion on 2009’s Live Anthology, which I’m really excited to dig into with my co-host John Paulsen. When played live, the track was frequently for Benmont Tench to really roll up his sleeves and cut loose on the piano and remind every that we was every bit as incredible as musician as the other members of the Heartbreakers.

Your question for this week is this. Who is the only member of the Traveling wilburys who does not appear on Full Moon Fever. And you should be able to rule one out pretty much immediately! Is it a) Jeff Lynne, b) Roy Orbison, c) George Harrison, or d) Bob Dylan?

OK, back to the song. After that fantastic third verse, the chorus then repeats as it has twice before, with no deviation or addition until we get to that fourth bar, where usually the drums would drop out to lead us back into the verse progression. Instead we get a seven note snare fill to come back into the chorus again. You may have been expecting a bridge or a solo somewhere before now but with this type of rhythm underpinning the song, it would be difficult to write something that doesn’t take you out of the vibe and feel of the song. After this iteration, we get the big hung chord to fade and you think the song is over. Suckers!!! Tom, Mike, and Jeff aren’t done with you yet! The verse progression comes back in and Mike slides us into the outro where we get some yehs from Tom and a sweeping harmony vocal a couple of times. We also get an absolute little gem really late on. Around 3:14 you get these great muted arpeggios that you don’t think you’ve heard before. But once you hear them her, if you go back and listen to the other choruses, they’re there too, but they’re buried a little because of the vocals. This just shows yet again how much bloody guitar there is on this album and how brilliantly Jeff Lynne layers it all up. Mike does play a quasi-solo in the fade out and the song just glides away from you.

From the end of January to the beginning of March 1990, the song was an ever present in the live setlist before vanishing back into the vault never to be played live again! While no official version of the track has been released, I will add a link to a bootleg version in the episode notes if you want to give that a listen! At 3:29, A Mind with Heart of its Own is the longest track on side two by almost half a minute but it blows by so quickly that you wouldn’t know it.  

OK PettyHeads, that’s it for this week! A Mind With a Heart Of Its Own is a real sleeper track on Full Moon Fever. Sequenced in the penultimate slot on the record, where lesser songs often go to die, this one provides a brilliant pick me up after Alright For Now. And John Paulsen and I will talk lots about sequencing when we do the album wrap episode coming up really soon! I adore the swinging groove on this track. I love the densely packed guitars and Tom’s excellent vocal delivery. But it’s the lyrics that really kick this one up to a level it wouldn’t otherwise sit at for me. Especially those second and third verses. I know this might be a point too high, but this track just makes me grin like an idiot every time I hear it and if music makes you happy, it should be treasured. I’m going to give this one an 7 out of 10!

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: Who is the only member of the Traveling wilburys who does not appear on Full Moon Fever. And you should be able to rule one out pretty much immediately! Is it a) Jeff Lynne, b) Roy Orbison, c) George Harrison, or d) Bob Dylan?

ANSWER: Well, I’ve said Jeff Lynne’s name in every episode of this season, so I’m assuming you spotted that he’s not the answer. George Harrison appears on “I Won’t Back Down” of course, lending his voice and acoustic guitar to the song. So it’s between Roy Orbison and Bob Dyaln and the answer is . . . . . d) Bob Dylan. Roy Orbison of course provides backing vocals on today’s song Zombie Zoo but after the Wilbury’s recording sessions and album release, Bob went straight back out on tour, so the chances are he just wasn’t around at the time that Tom’s debut solo record was being recorded.

Lyrics

I remember her standing in the tall grass and cattails
Away from the windows at the end of the day
Watch the men from the landing
With tall hats and coat-tails
She'd never look different
But something would change

A mind, with a heart of its own
A mind, with a heart of its own
Yeah a mind with a heart of its own

Well the man out to end us had a hurricane business
He'd raise them from babies all by himself
But his teen-age accountant had become surrounded
He drank up the party and everyone left

A mind, with a heart of its own
A mind, with a heart of its own
Yeah a mind with a heart of its own

Well I been to Brooker and I been to Micanopy
I been to St. Louis too, I been all around the world
I've been over to your house
And you've been over sometimes to my house
I've slept in your tree house
My middle name is Earl

A mind, with a heart of its own
A mind, with a heart of its own
Yeah a mind with a heart of its own
A mind, with a heart of its own
A mind, with a heart of its own
Yeah a mind with a heart of its own

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