“This is a Tom Petty song. And for me, and some many others growing up, this was our first insight into the dream of living in California. And it is a dream.”
I didn’t give much thought to the meaning behind Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty until John Mayer said this during his FireAid performance, where he masterfully covered the song.
I knew there was a good girl, a bad boy, long days, vampires, and Ventura Boulevard. Whenever I heard the song play, I just free fell into it, and then came alive singing the words, ‘And I’m free, free fallin’.’ Now, thinking about Mayer’s comment, it all makes sense.
“Sometime the song can come so fast that you’re suspicious as to where it came from,” said Tom Petty in an interview about song writing. “There’s some kind of actual magic going on there.”
“While I was on tour in England with Bob Dylan. One night, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison came back, and they gave me a cassette of George’s new album they’d just done called Cloud 9. And I played it, and I loved the sound and immediately thought of looking up Jeff Lynne,” said Petty. “I never got to because I found him at a red light,” recalled Petty. “It was Thanksgiving Day” in 1987 (Thursday, November 26).
“I was driving in Beverly Hills, and this horn kept blaring. I thought, ‘Who the hell’s that?’ and it was him. He was yelling, ‘Pull over! I wanna have a word with you!’ So we pulled over, and he said, ‘Oh, I really like what you did with George’s album. Did you fancy doing something together?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it’d be nice,’” said Lynne. “So I went around his house, and we sort of just sat around strumming, you know like we do. And we came up with Free Fallin’, which was amazing.”
Lyrically: Free Fallin’
Free Fallin’ was released on October 27, 1989, as the third single and serves as the opening track from Petty’s debut solo album, Full Moon Fever. The first two singles were I Won’t Back Down, released on April 14th, 1989, and Runnin’ Down a Dream, released on July 29, 1989.
Recording sessions were primarily held in Mike Campbell’s garage studio, who co-produced the album with Lynne. Campbell was the lead guitarist of the Heartbreakers and a longtime Petty collaborator.
In a 1989 interview, Petty said the impetus of Free Fallin’ came in the form as a gift. “‘Bugs, a roadie who’s been with us since the day we started, bought me this Yamaha keyboard. I said, Man, why’d you buy that? It’s expensive! He said, If you write one song on it, it’ll pay for itself. So he charged it to me and left it there.”
“Jeff Lynne and I were sitting around with the idea of writing a song and I was playing the keyboard and I just happened to hit on that main riff, the intro of the song, and I think Jeff said something like, ‘That’s a really good riff but there’s one chord too many,’ so I think I cut it back a chord and then, really just to amuse Jeff, honestly, I just sang that first verse,” said Petty.
“Jeff goes, ‘Wait. What was that? Just play that first part over and over.’ Okay, I did. And Jeff’s just sitting there smiling, and he says, ‘Go on, sing something,’” recalled Petty. “So, just to make Jeff smile, I sang, ‘She’s a good girl, loves her mama.’ From there, I wrote the first and second verses completely spontaneously. We were smart enough to have a cassette on.”
“Lately I try to write more with characters. I’ve just discovered that in the last few albums I’ve done. I really enjoy writing and inventing little characters and even the narrator is the character sometimes, said Petty in 1989.
She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too
The opening lyrics describe an all-American good girl who loves her mother, Jesus, her country, Elvis, horses and her boyfriend.
Petty was born on October 20, 1950 and became interested in rock ‘n’ roll after meeting Elvis Presley in 1961. His uncle Eddie, a carpenter, was working on the set of Follow That Dream.
“I must have been 10 or 11 years old. My aunt came over and said, ‘Elvis Presley is making a movie, and your uncle’s working on the picture. I thought maybe you’d like to go down one day and watch the filming, see Elvis.’ Elvis appeared like, you know, a vision. He didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen, and I’m just dumbstruck,” said Petty. My uncle said, ‘You know, Elvis, this is my family; this is my nephew.’ And Elvis kind of, ‘Yeah,’ and then, you know, moved on.”
”I went home a changed man,” said Petty. “When I hit the street the next day, I was trying to find some Elvis Presley records. The music just hypnotized me, and I played these records to the point my parents began to worry that something was wrong with me.”
And it’s a long day, livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway, runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy, ’cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart
Reseda is located in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California and has 60,000 living there. Realtors describe it as “the quintessential urban-suburban residential community.” “Reseda has a relative paucity of nightlife and cultural activities,” says the Los Angeles Times.
The “long days” happen in Reseda.
The narrator of the song is a self-declared bad boy who doesn’t miss the girl he left or her broken heart, presumably because he decided to leave to experience something and somewhere free.
And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
“Jeff said, ‘Go up on the chorus, take your voice up a whole octave. What’ll that sound like?’ I said, ‘What do I sing?’ Jeff said, ‘I’m free fallin’.’ So I sang, ‘I’m freeee…’ He said, ‘Whoa, there’s power in that. That’s good,’ said Petty.
“I got to the chorus of the song and he leaned over to me and said the word, ‘freefalling.’ And I went to sing that and he said, ‘No, take your voice up and see how that feels.’ So I took my voice up an octave or two, but I couldn’t get the whole word in. So I sang ‘freeee,’ then ‘free falling.’ And we both knew at that moment that I’d hit on something pretty good. It was that fast,” said Petty.
”He had to go somewhere, and I wrote the last verse and kind of just polished the rest of the song and when I saw him the next day I played him the song and he was like, ‘Wow, you did that last night?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he said. ‘We’ve got to go cut this,’ and we just took off to Mike Campbell’s studio where we knew we could get in and get it done that day. So we went in and made the record that day,” recalled Petty.
All the vampires, walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard
“Axl Rose called and asked me, ‘Where did you get that line about the vampires in the valley?’ When I’m driving, I sometimes see these shadowy-looking people just off the sidewalks, around the post office. I always thought of them as vampires for some reason,” stated Petty.
“I had to drive down Ventura Boulevard and over Mulholland every day to get to Mike’s house,” said Petty. “There’s a lot going on out there on that street if you ever drive up and down it a lot and see it at night and… I think it’s becoming more action oriented, really, than it used to be in the old days like Hollywood or Sunset, but these days I find Ventura Boulevard much more interesting.”
Petty said, “On that drive, I just used to look at Ventura Boulevard, and just life’s great pageant was going in up and down that street. And I tried to grab a little bit of these characters on the road and it was kind of how I saw it.”
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
And the good girls are home with broken hearts
With the vampires out at night, the bad boys leave the usual for the unusual to experience life outside the norm. They go through the valley, in the shadows of the vampires, down to the happenings on Ventura Boulevard. Meanwhile, “the good girls are home with broken hearts.” Just crushed.
I wanna glide down over Mulholland
The driving time between Reseda and Ventura Blvd is 1 hour. The 101 Freeway (Ventura Freeway) runs through Reseda, heading west down Ventura Boulevard. However, Mulholland Drive, otherwise known as “Bad Boy Drive,” is a winding road that takes you through the hills above the valley, giving legendary views of Los Angeles.
I wanna write her name in the sky
I’m gonna free fall out into nothin’
Gonna leave this world for a while
The bad boy loves the good girl and expresses this by wanting to write her name in the sky for everyone to witness, perhaps showing his devotion. However, he needs to feel a sense of freedom, without a routine, just “for a while.”
Now I’m free, free fallin’
(Free fallin’, I’m-a free fallin’, I’m-a
Free fallin’, I’m-a free fallin’, I’m-a)
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
Free Fallin’ helps you breathe deeper. Happier. Content. You become free. The song is part of America.
When Petty finished Full Moon Fever, originally named Songs From the Garage, and presented it to MCA Records, the executives dismissed it. “I was stunned. It’s the only time in my life that a record’s been rejected… They didn’t hear a single… So this is what you’re up against in the music business… They didn’t want to release it. They wanted me to go away and come up with a single. So I was pretty devastated. And I just kind of put it on the back burner. And I was really depressed,” said Petty.
This overlapped with the unimaginable and grateful creation of the Traveling Wilburys, which was first mentioned publicly by George Harrison during a live appearance on the radio program Rockline on February 10th, 1988.
“Finally I picked myself up,” Petty explained. “I said, ‘I’m not buying this, there’s nothing wrong, I really like this record.’ And then I waited awhile, until the top regime at the record company changed. And I came back and I played them the same record, and they were overjoyed. It turned out to be a huge hit.”
During the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, Tom Petty was joined on stage by Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, and they performed Free Fallin’. This is remembered as a historic moment in rock music.
Free Fallin’ was nominated for the Best Rock Vocal Performance – Male at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards in 1990, and is ranked No. 219 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song appeared in the film Jerry Maguire and in an episode of The Sopranos called Funhouse.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played the Super Bowl XLII Halftime Show on February 3rd, 2008. Three of the four songs—Free Fallin’, I Won’t Back Down, and Runnin’ Down a Dream — are from Full Moon Fever. The fourth song, American Girl, is from their self-titled debut album in 1976.
“There’s not a day that goes by that someone doesn’t hum ‘Free Fallin” to me, or I don’t hear it somewhere,” stated Petty. “But it was really only 30 minutes of my life.”
“He’s, of anyone I’ve worked with, the most a craftsman. He can write a song and then know how to take that song and make it into the best record it can be. He’s also got the inspiration where the songs come through him. I’ve sat down with him where he’ll play me a song that’s written in five minutes, a complicated story, and I’ll ask him afterwards, ‘You know, what’s that about or what’s the inspiration?’ He’ll say he has no idea; he doesn’t know what it’s about at all. It just kind of comes through him,” stated Rick Rubin.
“‘Free Fallin’. That was a huge song. You know, that’s one of those songs that kinda came out and stopped the clock. It has that kind of suspended, swinging chord structure that makes you feel like you’re floating up in the air and coming down. And then the lyric is so beautiful, and again has that fantastic combination of being specific but still open. Not abstract, but open. So that you don’t know all the details, and you can fill them in for yourself,’ said MTV EVP/Editorial Director Bill Flanagan.
