Learning To Fly
Well I started out down a dirty road, started out all alone.
That opening line doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t set a scene or establish a premise. It just places you somewhere — on a road, by yourself, at the beginning of something you’re not sure about. The whole song is going to follow that road and you don’t know where it goes. Neither does the person walking it.
Tom Petty wrote “Learning to Fly” in about twenty minutes at his home studio in 1991, which tells you something about how true it is. He’d been through the worst of his legal battles with MCA, the hand injury that nearly ended his playing, the fire that burned his house down with his family inside it. He came out the other side with the Heartbreakers still intact and a new record to make. He sat down, the line came, and the song was done before he could second-guess it.
The production is Jeff Lynne, as spare as anything Lynne has ever made. The Electric Light Orchestra architect could bury a song in orchestration without breaking a sweat, and here he does almost nothing — a clean acoustic guitar on the top, Mike Campbell’s electric sitting just underneath it, Stan Lynch keeping a beat that never hurries. The song breathes. It’s one of those records where you can hear the room.
What Petty understood, and what makes the song still land thirty-plus years on, is that learning to fly has nothing to do with succeeding at it.
The narrator doesn’t figure it out. He doesn’t discover his wings and bank elegantly toward the horizon. He just keeps going. What goes up must come down. Not a tragedy. Not a moral. Just physics stated plainly by someone who has come down a few times and gotten back up and is still walking the road. The song is about the going, not the arriving.
I’m learning to fly, around the clouds. What goes up must come down.
It’s not inspirational in the way the radio played it as inspirational. The radio heard the chorus and the major-key melody and filed it with the other songs about perseverance, the climbing-the-mountain songs. But Petty’s not climbing anything. He’s wandering. He started out alone and he’s still alone and the clouds are still there and none of this is resolved. The song ends on “I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings” — not triumphant, not defeated, just honest. He’s still in the middle of something.
That’s the part that takes nerve to leave in. Most songwriters can’t resist giving the listener somewhere to land. Petty leaves you floating.
Petty would spend the next three decades proving he was capable of more complex and stranger material — Wildflowers in 1994 alone contains more range than most artists get in a career. But he kept coming back to the road songs, the simple ones, the ones that moved because they refused to be more than they needed to be. He trusted the listener to do some of the work, and the listener always did.
He died in October 2017, one day after the final show of what turned out to be a fortieth-anniversary Heartbreakers tour. He’d been on that road a long time. He was walking it up until the last moment.
The line at the beginning of the song — started out down a dirty road, started out all alone — is not biography, exactly. But it’s not not biography. There’s something in it that sounds like a man who knows what it costs to keep moving and is going to keep moving anyway, because the alternative is standing still on a dirty road alone, and that’s worse.
You don’t learn to fly by figuring it out. You learn by not stopping.
