When a vocal part isn’t sitting quite right in the studio, the knee-jerk reaction can often be to work harder: push more from the diaphragm, modify the vowels, or some might even go so far as to change the whole key of the song so it fits better in their vocal range. But when Tom Petty was experiencing a similar hurdle during the making of Damn The Torpedoes, he tried the opposite approach.
Petty’s longtime collaborator and Heartbreakers bandmate Mike Campbell gave him two iconic tracks on one demo tape in the late 1970s: “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl”. The music was there. Petty just had to write the lyrics. When he finally came up with words for the latter track, he ran into yet another obstacle. No matter how he approached the vocal melody, nothing seemed to work.
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“It’s not an easy song to sing over,” Petty said in an interview with Paul Zollo. “I kept listening to it, [and] I remember Ron Blair [Heartbreakers bassist] came by my house one day. He said, ‘You know, that’s really a great piece of music there.’ And that stuck in my mind. I felt I have to learn this thing. I’m not going to let it get away from me. Then, I got the idea for the narration.”
How Blondie, The Byrds, and The Shangri-Las Inspired “Here Comes My Girl”
After struggling with how to sing the verses to “Here Comes My Girl”, Tom Petty decided not to sing them at all. Instead, he spoke the words in a recitative style, his Southern drawl on full display. The decision not only made the verses more conversational, which played into the testimonial nature of what he was saying. But it also made the move to a melodic chorus that much more impactful. When the narrator doesn’t have his girl, things are lackluster, stressful, and hard. But when that first “here comes my girl” kicks in, it’s as if all is right in the world.
The decision was a smart one, and it unsurprisingly made the final cut of the record. And according to Petty, he had The Shangri-Las (and a little bit of Blondie) to thank. “I don’t know if Blondie ever did a narration track,” Petty admitted to Paul Zollo. “Maybe I heard [Debbie Harry] do it in a show. But I’m thinking, maybe not Blondie, but the Shangri-Las, or somebody like that. Blondie sort of reminds me of the Shangri-Las. You used to hear [narration] done like that on those girl-group records from time to time.”
Whereas Blondie and The Shangri-Las helped inform the verses, Petty said that he was thinking of The Rolling Stones or The Byrds during the choruses. “Wrapping it all into one bundle, you come up with something that’s original in itself.” And he was right. Although “Here Comes My Girl” didn’t have the same chart performance as some of Petty’s other hits (peaking at a modest No. 59 on the Billboard Hot 100), it remains a favorite amongst Petty fans to this day.
Photo by Virginia Turbett/Redferns