All of Tom Petty’s Solo Songs Ranked

By the time Tom Petty’s debut solo album Full Moon Fever was released in April 1989, he was one of the biggest names in American popular music. The stats back this up: Of the seven albums he’d already released with his band, the Heartbreakers, three had gone Platinum, while the other four had earned gold status. He’d written 10 Billboard Top 40 hits, seven of which had landed in the Top 20 (an eighth reached #21). He was ubiquitous on the Mainstream Rock charts and was one of the first breakout stars of MTV.

But Petty didn’t just lead a band called The Heartbreakers. They were Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Petty’s name was already on every album he’d ever released, so casual listeners would be forgiven if they were unaware that something had changed for Petty (artistically) and the band (dynamically).

But, man, had something changed.

Petty’s solo career stands as a fascinating chapter in rock history, filled with intimate, introspective songwriting that was, sometimes, at odds with the Heartbreakers’ version of himself. This is true both in terms of Petty the songwriter and Petty the storyteller. Solo Petty offered a softer, more introspective side of the artist who introduced himself to the world with songs like “American Girl,” “I Need To Know,” “Refugee” and “The Waiting.”

Believe it or not, Petty and the Heartbreakers were often lumped in with the punk and new wave acts who were disrupting rock radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They shared stages with bands like Blondie and The Clash, and their first record came out the same year as the Ramones’ debut. Petty was always angrier and more surly than his pop hits let on, and he absolutely detested the business of making music.

But beneath the brashness and buried under top-notch pop sensibilities, he never stopped being the kid from Gainesville, Florida who loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and great American blues artists like Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf. Petty was a student of music and you could always hear those artists and others referenced somewhere on his albums with the Heartbreakers. The album that made him a household name, 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes, contained “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl.” But it also had “Louisiana Rain.” Just as the same album that featured “Don’t Come Around Here No More”—1985’s Southern Accents—also included “Spike.”

Solo Petty was always lurking in the shadows.

He only released three solo records. Besides Full Moon Fever, there was Wildflowers (1994) and Highway Companion (2006). The first and last were produced by frequent collaborator and Traveling Wilburys bandmate Jeff Lynne. Wildflowers was the beginning of a three-album run with Rick Rubin, though the next two would be Petty with the Heartbreakers.

But it was also never as simple as that. So, what do you include in a ranking like this one? Obviously, this list includes everything that came out on those three proper releases—that’s 39 tracks total. It also includes anything released as a non-album B-side to any of the singles released as part of those albums. Petty had a few of those.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Since his untimely death in 2017, Petty’s estate—along with the Heartbreakers’ brain trust of guitarist and top lieutenant Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench—has put out a trove of unreleased music from throughout Petty’s career, mostly in the form of some incredible deluxe boxed set editions, including one of Wildflowers, which was originally supposed to be a double album. Some of those songs stack up against the best work Petty ever created, so I decided they belonged on this list. But only if they had never gone on to be included on any Heartbreakers records.

So, several of the Wildflowers outtakes that were released as part of the never-before-heard double album (2020’s Wildflowers & All The Rest) are not ranked here (like “California,” “Climb That Hill” and “Hope You Never”) because they went on to be part of the 1996 Heartbreakers album Songs and Music from “She’s The One”.

With all of that said, I was left with an almost nice round number (52) to rank from worst (I’m a superfan and apologist, so “worst” is a relative word) to best. So in honor of Tom Petty’s masterpiece, Wildflowers—released 30 years ago today—here is every Tom Petty solo song ranked. Let the arguments begin:

52. “Zombie Zoo” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Petty himself went on the record saying he disliked this song, which was the final track on Full Moon Fever. “I do not understand how that got on the record when I had better stuff that didn’t get on the record.” He’s right. But we’ll get to that later. A throwaway about punks from a Boomer point of view.

51. “Down the Line” (B-Side, 1989)

Tom Petty could expertly cover a 1960s soul song in his sleep. His attempt at writing one is a different story. This was relegated to the B-side of the “Free Falling” single.

50. “A Mind With a Heart of Its Own” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

When he started hanging out with George Harrison, Bob Dylan and the rest of the future Traveling Wilburys, Petty, several years their junior, started to change his sound and pop aesthetic to mirror theirs. This would’ve been better off as a Wilburys song.

49. “Lonesome Dave” (An American Treasure, 2018)

Sounds like what it is—a not-terrible studio jam from the Wildflowers sessions. It probably stayed buried for a reason.

48. “Girl on LSD” (B-Side, 1994)

See above. These studio moments are an important part of Heartbreakers lore and a fascinating window into the band dynamic. It’s okay if they rarely produced great songs.

47. “Around the Roses” (Highway Companion, Expanded Edition, 2007)

One of two songs recorded for his final solo outing that didn’t make the final cut but were part of a curious expanded version released a year later. It fits with the album and would have done no harm had it been included originally. It’s also unremarkable.

46. “This Old Town” (Highway Companion, 2006)

Musically not one of the most memorable tracks on Highway Companion, but it has some of the best lyrics on a record dense with them. “Living free,” he writes in the song’s brilliant first line, “Is gaining on me.”

45. “The Apartment Song” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

“The Apartment Song” was originally intended for Petty’s 1985 Heartbreakers release, Southern Accents. In its earlier life, it was a duet with Stevie Nicks. We finally heard that version on An American Treasure and it makes a lot more sense than it does with Lynne’s fingerprints all over it.

44. “Ankle Deep” (Highway Companion, 2006)

Another story song. The most Jeff Lynne-sounding song on the record. Sounds like another Wilburys song.

43. “Feel A Whole Lot Better” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

A solid, faithful cover of a Byrds song. But again, how (and why) did it end up on the album?

42. “Jack” (Highway Companion, 2006)

As a Jack myself, I really wanted to like this one. One highlight: Petty really gets after it on the drums.

41. “Cabin Down Below” (Wildflowers, 1994)

One of the lighter moments on Wildflowers. It’s fine and an excellent recording, it just doesn’t belong on Wildflowers.

40. “Damaged By Love” (Highway Companion, 2006)

Petty started churning out these fragile love songs around the time of Wildflowers. This one from Highway Companion is in the same vein as “Angel Dream” from the She’s the One soundtrack or “Like a Diamond” from 2002’s largely forgettable The Last DJ.

39. “Honey Bee” (Wildflowers, 1994)

One of the heaviest rockers of Petty’s career that took on iconic status with Dave Grohl’s performance as an honorary Heartbreaker on SNL. I just wish it was a better song. We get to see more of Tom’s humor here, but again, it feels out of place on his most personal record.

38. “Depending on You” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

One of the better tracks on the much-weaker side two of Full Moon Fever. The vocal arrangement in the chorus is a prime example of what Jeff Lynne’s production style could do for Petty’s music.

37. “The Golden Rose” (Highway Companion, 2006)

As the last track on the last non-Heartbreakers record he’d make under his name, this was Tom Petty’s closing statement as a solo artist. Another of the story songs — this one’s about a riverboat — that makes up much of Highway Companion. Proof that Petty often finds solace in ¾ time when he’s feeling wistful.

36. “Big Weekend” (Highway Companion, 2006)

The stacks upon stacks upon stacks of acoustic guitars give off the most Full Moon Fever vibes of anything Petty and Lynne ever did outside of Full Moon Fever.

35. “Somewhere Under Heaven” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

A Wildflowers outtake that, before becoming part of disc two of the Wildflowers & All The Rest double album, somehow found its way onto the closing credits of the film version of the embarrassing HBO series Entourage. Petty once said he had no recollection of recording this track.

34. “Night Driver” (Highway Companion, 2006)

It may sound like Benmont Tench playing that noirish electric piano lick that appears throughout this Highway Companion album cut. But, in fact, it’s Petty himself. Highway was truly the solo-ist of his solo albums.

33. “Yer So Bad” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Whether they know it or not, when people do a Tom Petty impression, they’re referring to this song. The best of Petty’s story songs from the Wilburys-Lynne era.

32. “Flirting With Time” (Highway Companion, 2006)

A more infectious chorus you’ll never find. It’s almost too perfect, as if someone created an AI version of a late-era Tom Petty song.

31. “House In The Woods” (Wildflowers, 1994)

Wildflowers’ middle-aged man in pain reappears for this bridge to the two exposed-nerve tracks that wrap the album. The slow, dirgy blues in ¾ time has Petty asking, “What can I do but love you?” Campbell’s hypnotizing descending bassline makes this one worth a listen.

30. “To Find A Friend” (Wildflowers, 1994)

The opening lyric pretty much tells us where Petty was during the making of Wildflowers. “In the middle of his life/he left his wife/and ran off to be bad/boy it was sad.”

29. “Hard On Me” (Wildflowers, 1994)

One of the darkest songs on Petty’s darkest album. The plodding verses give way to a tortured chorus: “Maybe if I tried / I could turn the other cheek / Maybe, but how big do I have to be?”

28. “Confusion Wheel” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

A Wildflowers demo that never saw the light of day until the 2020 release of Wildflowers & All The Rest. Here’s one you would’ve loved to have seen fleshed out and added to the original release because it’s so of a piece with some of the gloomier tracks on Wildflowers.

27. “The Woods” (Single, 2016)

There’s never been much said about “The Woods,” which is surprising, considering it was released exclusively on Petty’s SiriusXM channel in 2016, while he was still alive. Recorded during the Highway Companion sessions, it would have fit nicely on the record as an uptempo antidote to the slower numbers on the back end.

26. “Only A Broken Heart” (Wildflowers, 1994)

“I’m not afraid anymore,” Petty sings in the chorus of this melancholic ballad that almost comically undermines what is essentially the worst emotion a human can experience. “It’s only a broken heart.” Petty was really going through it on Wildflowers, wasn’t he?.

25. “Home” (Highway Companion, Expanded Edition, 2007)

Another one from the “what were they thinking” department. For some reason, Petty left this driving track off of Highway Companion, relegating it to a B-side that nobody would hear. This is what the Heartbreakers would’ve sounded like if Lynne had gotten another crack at producing them.

24. “Turn This Car Around” (Highway Companion, 2006)

Highway Companion was the first time we got to hear Petty on the drums, and he really leaned into the staccato jabs we hear on tracks like this one, “Jack,” “This Old Town” and a few others. The bridge takes listeners into a psychedelic place Petty hadn’t ventured since “Don’t Come Around Here No More” almost 20 years earlier.

23. “Harry Green” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

This is Petty’s heartfelt tribute to a real-life classmate whose name really was Harry Green and who really helped him out by stopping a redneck from kicking his ass in school. Seemingly a popular student who played on the football team, Harry was also hiding something (Petty doesn’t say it, but it’s suggested that Harry was gay) that offended the macho sensibilities of Southern boys in the 1960s, and he later committed suicide. Another stunning Wildflowers outtake that surfaced after Petty’s death.

22. “Saving Grace” (Highway Companion, 2006)

The opening track on Highway Companion features Campbell’s swampy guitar textures and unparalleled slide work. This is one of the best straight-ahead rockers from the back-nine of Petty’s career.

21. “Something Could Happen” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

Petty’s often at his best when he’s expressing both hope and despair in the same song. It’s a shame it took more than 25 years for this piano-driven ballad to see the light of day.

20. “A Higher Place” (Wildflowers, 1994)

My guess is I rank this one higher than most. Wildflowers producer Rick Rubin managed to get the best out of Petty, but he also had some of the richest material to work with. Still, this jangler might have been even more transcendent if it was sprinkled with Lynne’s wall-of-sound-light sensibility.

19. “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

Made this list by the skin of its teeth because it never made it off the demo tape and was apparently never even considered for the album. But it was such a beautiful track, it was released as a single as part of the Wildflowers deluxe reissue.

18. “Leave Virginia Alone” (Wildflowers & All The Rest, 2020)

If you’re a Rod Stewart fan, you knew this song when he released it as a single in 1995. But if you’re a Rod Stewart and Tom Petty fan, you had to wait another 25 years to hear the source material. It was worth the wait.

17. “Square One” (Highway Companion, 2006)

If Wildflowers was Petty ruminating on his regrets and self-doubt, Highway Companion was written from the point of view of a man who had things figured out. One of the standouts from his final solo record, the sparse and fragile “Square One” is Petty both looking back and excited about what’s next.

16. “Down South” (Highway Companion, 2006)

I tend to be allergic to down-home story songs, but “Down South” is an exception. On this breezy strummer, Petty took everything he learned from Dylan and his experience with the Wilburys and synthesized it into 3:25 of exquisite precision. Petty, a proud native Floridian, describes going back home (to an unspecified location) to “sell the family headstone,” “pay off every witness,” while dressed in “seersucker and white linens.” From his final solo album, “Down South” is among Petty’s last truly great recorded moments.

15. “You Don’t Know How It Feels” (Wildflowers, 1994)

Improbably, at 44, Petty scored one of the biggest (and last) hits of his career and earned a Grammy with this sparse, percussive cut. It sticks close to the emotional theme of Wildflowers, with Petty’s weariness and uncertainty on display in his vocal. The rhythm section of future Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone and Petty himself on bass propels this earworm.

14. “Don’t Fade On Me” (Wildflowers, 1994)

There’s an eerie, English folkiness to “Don’t Fade on Me,” an acoustic dual guitar arrangement that features only Petty and Campbell. The lyric and vocal took on several iterations during the Wildflowers sessions before Petty finally landed on a version that describes a relationship that is falling apart largely because one of them is falling apart. Is it about his wife who he would soon divorce? Is it about Heartbreakers’ bassist Howie Epstein, who battled drug addiction (a battle he would ultimately lose) and played little on Petty’s solo records? On some level, the answer is probably both.

13. “You Wreck Me” (Wildflowers, 1994)

This probably shouldn’t be ranked so low because it’s probably in the top ten of Petty and the Heartbreakers’ best all-out rockers. But this is a list of his solo songs and this was recorded with all of the then-Heartbreakers and sounds like it could’ve fit on any of their albums. A technicality, sure, but I had to have some guardrails.

12. “Alright For Now” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Petty loved contradictions and this bittersweet lullaby delivers a doozy. Probably the best vocal performance on Full Moon Fever, “Alright For Now” is most memorable for the gentle warning to the object of the singer’s affection: “Don’t cry / It’s alright / For now.”

11. “Don’t Treat Me Like A Stranger” (B-Side, 1989)

This one’s a curveball because only Petty completists care or even know about this song. The B-side to The U.K. release of “I Won’t Back Down” is easily one of the five best songs Petty wrote during the Full Moon Fever sessions. It finally resurfaced and received a proper release on An American Treasure, but with its shimmering guitars, lush production and that killer hook, you can’t help but look at “Don’t Treat Me Like a Stranger” as the hit that got away.

10. “Time To Move On” (Wildflowers, 1994)

When I heard that Tom Petty had died, I immediately tuned to Tom Petty Radio on my Sirius app. This was the song that was playing and it forever changed my interpretation of what it meant. Obviously, Petty was not singing about dying some 20-plus years before his death. But he was definitely singing about leaving something or making a hard pivot on some other kind of journey. “What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing,” he tells us in the chorus. None of us do, but the conviction he displays in his plaintive but determined vocal is comforting. Somehow.

9. “A Face In The Crowd” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

If you were a fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and you’d just purchased Petty’s first solo album, by the time you got to track 3, if you hadn’t already been aware you were listening to a completely different version of Petty, this track would hammer it home. “A Face in the Crowd” is the first inkling that the singer was a man in trouble—haunted by a melancholy that we wouldn’t fully understand until Wildflowers.

8.“Love Is A Long Road” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Another of Petty’s songs that has enjoyed a recent generational crossover moment as it appeared in 2023 as part of the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. In just a few months, the exposure took the song from about 5 million streams on Spotify to nearly 40 million. The newest fans of this song were treated to the closest Petty ever came to sounding like his generation’s classic rock giants. The synth and guitar intro recalls The Who classics like “Baba O’Reilly” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” with Jeff Lynne’s layered harmony arrangements carrying the chorus. Another Petty solo cut that would become a Heartbreakers live staple.

7. “Wake Up Time” (Wildflowers, 1994)

“You were so cool / Back in high school / What happened?” Tom Petty moans in the final track on Wildflowers. Who was he singing to? It turns out, he would say later, he was singing to himself. Wildflowers has often been described as Petty’s midlife “divorce album.” Despite being a longstanding rock cliche, it’s not inaccurate to say much of this album is about his long-simmering domestic troubles. But it’s also about a man in his mid-40s realizing there was something more to life than he’d allowed himself to experience. “Wake Up Time” features Petty on piano, composer Michael Kamen’s sweeping orchestral arrangement. Petty’s vocal is a deep howl that reveals a man in tremendous pain. “You’re just a poor boy/ A long way from home,” he tells himself. He would soon find peace, he just didn’t know it yet.

6. “Runnin’ Down a Dream” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Petty once said that when he was writing the songs that would become Full Moon Fever, he was self-aware enough to realize that those songs “weren’t Heartbreakers songs.” Of course, the band would go on tour with Petty to support the album and went on to play the Full Moon Fever smash hits live for nearly 30 more years. They would ultimately make all of the songs their own, but “Runnin’ Down a Dream” is the only one from the album that felt like it was made for the band. Campbell achieves peak Campbell with the long guitar solo that serves as the outro.

5. “It’s Good To Be King” (Wildflowers, 1994)

Petty called this one of the best songs he ever wrote. An almost dreamlike meditation on ambition, power, and the fleeting nature of satisfaction. It opens with a gentle, piano-driven melody and builds into an expansive arrangement with layered guitars and strings. Petty’s vocals are a mix of longing and resignation, as he explores the allure of status and the disillusionment that can follow. The track balances a sense of yearning with subtle irony, capturing the complex emotions of someone both seduced by and skeptical of life’s rewards.

4. “I Won’t Back Down” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Jack White has said that by turning The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” into a sports anthem, football and soccer fans around the world have turned the song into folk music. The same has happened to “I Won’t Back Down,” thanks to Florida Gators fans, who now famously belt this classic at the end of the third quarter of every home football game. This was another of the seismic singles off Full Moon Fever that put Tom Petty’s career into a different category than it had been previously. Its simple lyric is Petty at his most direct and least opaque. But years later, when Johnny Cash recorded it for his 2000 release American III: Solitary Man, the song became something else entirely.

3. “Crawling Back To You” (Wildflowers, 1994)

A fever dream that sees Petty at his most lyrically abstract. Fans have been trying for 30 years to ascribe meaning to lines like “The ranger came with burning eyes / The chambermaid awoke surprised,” or “It was me and my sidekick / He was drunk and I was sick / We were caught up in a barroom fight / Till an Indian shot out the lights.” But it was the next line that may be the best bit of poetry Petty ever put to music—and no one can dispute its meaning: “I’m so tired of being tired / Sure as light will follow day / Most things I worry about / Never happen anyway.” According to Petty himself, the weaving of surreal and plain-speak was intentional:

“That’s a good thing to do,” he told writer Paul Zollo, whose 2005 book Conversations With Tom Petty is like a bible for Petty fans. “If you get too specific, you kind of want to pull away from it. Because now things are getting almost narrative, and you don’t want to do that. So you give them a little taste of that, and then back away. Into something that’s not as nailed down. And it creates a nice mixture, and does a certain thing in the mind. So that was an instance where that kind of thing actually worked really well.”

2. “Wildflowers” (Wildflowers, 1994)

Tom Petty’s deepest, darkest and most introspective album opens with a light, airy, capo’d acoustic strumming pattern that reveals little about the journey on which he’s about to send his listeners. As the song builds we hear Mike Campbell’s bass come in first, followed by more strings and horns charted by Kamen, and lastly, the pitter-patter of Tench’s lilting piano, which fully fleshes out the arrangement. If you’re going to have an album called Wildflowers that includes a song called “Wildflowers,” this is how you want it to open.

Lyrically, it’s another example of Petty singing to himself. The entire lyric is written in the second person, this is Petty telling himself to sail away and go find a lover in a place where he feels free. Petty said it took him years to realize that this was all advice he was giving himself. The most remarkable thing about this vocal and lyric is that Petty later said the entire thing came to him the first time he laid it down. “I swear to God, it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he told Zollo. “I turned on my tape-recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish.”

1. “Free Fallin” (Full Moon Fever, 1989)

The first song Petty wrote for Full Moon Fever was “Yer So Bad.” The second, he said, was “Free Fallin.” That’s when Petty’s songwriting, and career, found another gear. He didn’t know at the time that he was working on a solo album. He just knew something needed to change and the new music that was coming out of him was different from anything he’d ever shown the Heartbreakers.

So it makes sense that Tom Petty’s most iconic anthem describes the bittersweet experience of letting go. The song opens with a simple, unmistakable guitar riff played on a 12-string that feels expansive and timeless, evoking a wide-open landscape as vast as the California highways he would name-check in the verses. The quiet melancholy in Petty’s voice is something he showed glimpses of in previous Heartbreakers records, but would master here. And it’s a place he would return to time and time and time again for the rest of his career. “Free Fallin” resonates as a timeless meditation on youth, freedom, and the bittersweet awareness of leaving things behind. It captures the emotional complexity of being “free,” not just physically, but emotionally and existentially. Kind of like when a successful bandleader goes out on his own for the first time.