{"id":521,"date":"2013-03-22T09:53:28","date_gmt":"2013-03-22T09:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/douglascowie.com\/?p=521"},"modified":"2013-03-22T09:53:28","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T09:53:28","slug":"song-of-the-week-dont-come-around-here-no-more-by-tom-petty-and-the-heartbreakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/?p=521","title":{"rendered":"Song of the Week: “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each Friday I pick a song\u2013new, old, borrowed, blue\u2013that\u2019s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.<\/p>\n

“Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is this week’s song:<\/p>\n

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers– “Don’t Come Around Here No More”<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a weird song, and here’s why: Petty cowrote it with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The song doesn’t quite follow a verse-chorus-verse structure, but then again, it doesn’t quite not <\/em>follow that structure, either.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

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