![]() ![]() Petty’s were songs you shared with other people, because, quite simply, everybody else liked them too. This one will always remind me of one of the first house parties I ever attended. Very late in the night, after most people had left, our host was trying to find music to fit the mood everyone was too tired for dancing. But he put on “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and without a word everyone got up and started doing this goofy, downtempo strut around the coffee table, picking up random people’s jackets and scarves and adorning ourselves in odd outfits to the beat and all silently having this late-teenage realization that, even though our parents liked this song, we did too. It was a warm, silly scene, and if Tom Petty were there he would have laughed. “You Don’t Know How It Feels” isn’t the flashiest or most urgent ditty Tom Petty ever wrote. It’s not straining to prove his status as a guitar hero, which he earns on plenty of other songs. It’s not straining to prove anything, actually. His first single from 1994’s gorgeous Wildflowers has, instead, the rhythm of a rocking chair, and an overall vibe of middle-aged self-acceptance I’ve always found to be aspirationally cool. May we all grow this gently wise in time. Steeped in the ’80s, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” doesn’t resemble Petty’s earlier hits-not the rock ’n’ roll wall of sound of “Refugee,” nor the idealism of “American Girl.” It’s a mishmash of synthesized percussion and sitar fittingly, the video is a riff on Alice in Wonderland. But anchoring the song is Petty, his raw emotion, a voice that has always felt timeless, and an otherworldly ability to make songs feel like they’re for you and about you. ![]() It’s the best evidence of his power that I can think of. ![]()
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