American Girl. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. 1976. Shelter.

 Like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, Tom Petty was a singer-songwriter whose talents came at us by way of the collaborative dynamic of rock group musicianship. Each was uniquely self-taught, attuned to the private voice of his interiority, and with a gift for making that voice public. They were commercial artists who tended towards group expression because of the power of their sensitivity, which, according to the facts of their lives, was often overwhelming. On his 1976 debut record with the Heartbreakers, Petty isn’t yet in full command of all his talents but his singing voice is already fully developed, at once confident and anxious, desperate and sexy, aggressively confrontational. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is the record of a band learning to come together in the recording studio and occasionally finding inspiration. Then, at the end of side two, a moment worthy of watching clouds part in the sky above to reveal a perfect bicentennial sun. Petty’s and Mike Campbell’s twin guitars chime the alarm of their arrival and then Petty begins singing in that inimitable, southern accented voice of his about a young woman, alone in post-Vietnam America, whose feelings over life’s broken promises have admitted her into Petty’s mythic world of alienated lives lost in the tumult of modern living. American Girl is one of the first of Petty’s great uptempo empathy songs, this one sung from so far inside of her perspective that you can practically hear in Petty’s voice his thirst for self-medication becoming one with her tortuous, repeated reliving of the past. The summer sun in Petty’s America is a bright, harmful thing throwing the shadows behind which are built all of life’s painfully sharpened edges, the scarring kind. Petty’s songbook warns that you’re better off just sleeping in and waiting for nightfall to emerge. Armed to the teeth with pharmaceuticals.

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