Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

“Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is this week’s song:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers– “Don’t Come Around Here No More”

This is a weird song, and here’s why: Petty cowrote it with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart.  When I was a little kid I thought Dave Stewart was one of the weirdest people I’d ever seen on television, but that’s besides the point here.  What makes the song weird is that Stewart is essentially a completely different kind of songwriter to Petty (who I never thought of as weird, but always liked), and the song ends up a kind of hybrid of their styles.  The two different tendencies play off each other here and coupled with the super slow pace create a haunting but pretty tension: those single bass notes, the psychedelic tinge of the sitar, simple guitar arpeggios.  The song doesn’t quite follow a verse-chorus-verse structure, but then again, it doesn’t quite not follow that structure, either.  And those “Hey!” shouts: they punctuate the whole song, and, at about the four-minute mark, exclaim the Heartbreakers’ escape from the tension of the collaboration: one electric guitar note, double-time rhythm, another lead guitar takes to the wah-wah pedal and Petty sings, “Break free!” before it all fades to silence (or in the case of the video, a belch).