Song: “Straight Into Darkness”

Since Tom Petty’s untimely death in 2017, his estate has done wonders to keep his music and legacy front and center.

Over the past 12 months, Petty’s music has been:

• featured in a massively popular video game trailer
• covered by more than a dozen top Country artists for Petty Country
• used as the soundtrack for a top-notch AppleTV+ show, Bad Monkey

It’s not just the Petty estate keeping his music front and center. It’s happening because Petty fans are everywhere.

At a recent ELO concert in Boston, Jeff Lynne — who wrote songs, produced records, and was a member of the Traveling Wilburys with Petty — played Petty songs exclusively during the interlude after the opening act.

This past weekend, I unexpectedly found myself teaching “Walls” to a 12-year-old who said it was his new favorite song after a sleepaway camp the prior week, where the counselors ended each day performing the song with guitars around the campfire.

Later that night, a packed venue full of young people at one of my band’s shows sang along at full voice to every Petty song. We could barely hear ourselves.

Petty’s music is everywhere these days.

It feels earned. As Anthony Mason of CBS News said in a feature about Petty Country last month, “The further along we get, the better Tom Petty’s catalog looks.”

Now, if all these organic and purposeful efforts to keep Petty’s music prominent weren’t enough, his 1982 album Long After Dark is being re-released with additional tracks restored.

This was something Petty himself wanted, referring to the notion in a later interview in his usual wry manner:

We ended up with 19 tracks [on Long After Dark], of which we used 10. Someday, I’d like to release “The Worst of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers” with the outtakes. They’re all good songs, but they didn’t fit moodwise.

To prove his point, one track that didn’t make the initial cut — “Ways to Be Wicked” — has been covered twice, once in 1985 by Lone Justice, which had a minor hit with it, and again this year by Margo Price for the Petty Country release.

Hits from Long After Dark included “You Got Lucky” and “Change of Heart,” but one song to me stands above the rest — the dissonant and beautiful “Straight Into Darkness.”

I felt justified in this view when the estate centered the release of the expanded versions of Long After Dark coming out next month with a new video for “Straight Into Darkness,” which has one of the most distinctive and unusual piano parts I’ve ever played, and which represents a dazzling example of the timeless tension and release power of music.

Enjoy!