Last Dance with Tom Petty

I was seventeen when I first heard Tom Petty's Mary Jane's Last Dance. I was driving around in the car with my mom, practicing for my driver's test the following day. When the song came on the radio, I instantly wanted to know whose song it was and listen to it a million times. There was something about the feel and tone of the song that grabbed my attention and told a complex story. To me, it was about many things and perhaps nothing of what Tom expected the song to be. I asked my mom what the song was and she said she thought it was Tom Petty.

When we returned home from driving around in circles, I looked up the song on Youtube and found a cd that my dad had of Tom Petty. I downloaded the song onto my iPod touch and played it on repeat for hours. There's something about the beginning of this song that says everything without words. The instruments, the echo, and the electric guitar create this unique feeling that everything is wrong and it's all caused by running away from who you're supposed to be to form this person that stays in people's memory.

The woman he’s singing about in the song isn't perfect and he details the aspects of her character that aren’t pretty. He doesn’t see past them and she doesn’t doesn’t try to hide them. Maybe I grasped onto his version of this woman because we, as the listener, do not know if her version of herself matches how he’s choosing to depict her as. We’re not aware of he’s a reliable narrator. To me, she represents someone who I’m never capable of being but ultimately was. At the time when I first heard this song, I wasn’t able to acknowledge who I was. I was mentally on the run, refusing aspects of myself I can’t change and yet everyone hears it. I was scared of what acknowledging who I am could mean. I wasn’t prepared and I ran for as long as I could.

Nowadays, I’m no longer running away from myself. Therefore, I can no longer relate to the girl Tom Petty was singing about. Last Monday, when I heard he unfortunately left this life at the young age of  66, I listened to all the Tom Petty songs I love throughout my day on Tuesday. Listening to Mary Jane’s Last Dance over and over again, I could hear who I once was and who the women he sang about used to be.