Remembering When Tom Petty Hustled Out a New Album Because He Got Sick of His Previous One in 1978

Motivations for making a new album can run the gamut from the need to express oneself to the desire for monetary gain. Leave it to Tom Petty to come up with a unique reason for creating a new LP in 1978 with The Heartbreakers.

Petty and his stalwart band rushed out You’re Gonna Get It! as their sophomore LP. According to Petty, the driving motivation was so that they could finally start putting their successful debut record to bed.

A Slow-Building Debut

The success of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ self-titled 1976 debut album was very much a slow burn. When the album was released in November of that year, few paid any attention to it in America. After all, Petty was a no-name at the time. And the music’s focus on traditional rock values wasn’t the best fit for that time period.

To their credit, Petty and the band worked the album relentlessly. They toured in the UK, a decision that helped the song “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” become a British hit. Eventually, their persistence paid off when “Breakdown” worked its way into the US Top 40.

All that effort to make the debut record successful meant a steady diet of playing ten or so songs to live audiences for more than a year. That started to rankle Petty and the band after a while. As such, he decided they’d put out a new record to give them something else to play.

Needing New Stuff

Petty explained the scenario to author Paul Zollo in the book Conversations With Tom Petty:

“And the truth was we didn’t really need to bring out a record. I don’t know why we felt this urge. I think we were just bored with playing the same songs, because the first record was still doing real well when the second one came out. But we felt this urge to get another record out, and we went in and did that record really fast, and wrote it really fast. And probably should have taken more time with it, looking back.”

When Petty and company hit the studios at Shelter Records in Hollywood to make their second LP, they had only two songs ready to go. They’d been playing “Listen To Her Heart” and “Need To Know” for a while on tour.

Other than that, Tom Petty had to write a whole batch of new songs in a hurry. Perhaps that explains why the ten songs on You’re Gonna Get It!, released in 1978, didn’t even make it to 30 minutes of running time.

A Short but Solid LP

Maybe because they were so effectively road-tested by the time they were recorded, “Listen To Her Heart” and “Need To Know” stand out as the best songs on the record. The former captures the band at their galloping, melodic best. And the latter does a pretty good approximation of the New Wave music so popular at the time.

Elsewhere, “Magnolia”, written originally for Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, is a bittersweet keeper. And “No Second Thoughts” delivers a captivating change of pace with its open spaces and Petty’s empathetic lyrics about a runaway bride.

You’re Gonna Get It! didn’t quite capture the public’s imagination in the same manner as Petty’s debut. But all would work out in the end. Damn The Torpedoes, his third-album masterpiece, made sure of it.

(Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)

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