You Don't Know How It Feels

There’s a moment about forty-five seconds into this song where the drums come in and you realize Tom Petty has built a perfect machine, and the machine is going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the point.

It rolls. That’s the only word for it. The whole thing — the lazy shuffle, the organ sitting back in the pocket, the harmonica that sounds like it wandered in from another decade and decided to stay — it just rolls, unhurried and unbothered, like a car with good suspension on a long flat road.

Wildflowers came out in the fall of 1994, and it was the record Petty had been trying to make his whole career without knowing it. He and Rick Rubin went out to the Bel Air house where Rubin was living at the time and built the thing slowly, room by room, no rush, no interference. The Heartbreakers were there, mostly — Benmont Tench on the organ, Mike Campbell doing what Mike Campbell does, which is find the exact right guitar part and play it like it’s no big deal. But the record breathes differently than anything in the Petty catalog, looser, less polished, like somebody finally told him he didn’t have to prove anything.

He didn’t.

“You Don’t Know How It Feels” is the clearest example on the album of what that freedom sounds like. The song isn’t about much — roll another joint, take a ride, let me get to the point. It’s a shrug disguised as a song. And somehow that shrug is the most disarming thing in the world, because Petty delivers it with complete conviction, no wink, no apology.

“So let me get to the point, let’s roll another joint.”

MTV wouldn’t play the original video because Petty’s vocals were mixed to make it sound like he was saying something else. Radio edited the line. And Petty just — didn’t care. He wasn’t trying to be provocative. He wasn’t making a statement. He was writing about riding around and being tired of people who think they understand you, and that line was the truest, most direct way he knew to say it. The fact that it caused a fuss seemed to genuinely confuse him.

That’s the thing about Petty that gets lost when people talk about the hits, about “Free Fallin’” and “Refugee” and “American Girl” — he was almost constitutionally incapable of posturing. He wrote from wherever he actually was, not from wherever he thought he should be. When he was angry, the songs were angry. When he was worn out, the songs sounded like this: a shuffle, a harmonica, a lyric that doesn’t try to be more than what it is.

Campbell’s guitar throughout the track is a clinic in restraint. He finds a riff and lives in it, doesn’t show off, doesn’t wander. Tench’s organ is the same way — present, warm, never stepping on anything. Rubin understood that the song needed air, and he gave it air. The production is essentially a proof of concept: if the song is right, you don’t have to dress it up. You just put a good band in a room and let them play it.

Petty was forty-four when Wildflowers came out. He’d been at it for twenty years by then — the Mudcrutch days in Gainesville, the early Heartbreakers records, the MCA lawsuit where he essentially went broke fighting for the right to price his own album, the Traveling Wilburys, Full Moon Fever, the whole long road. He had nothing left to prove and everything left to say, and Wildflowers sounds like a man who finally understood that those two things together are the best possible place to make a record from.

He said once that Wildflowers was his favorite of all his records. You can hear why. It’s the one where he stopped running and just sat down somewhere comfortable and played the song exactly as he heard it in his head. No more, no less.

“You Don’t Know How It Feels” is four minutes and forty-nine seconds of a man who is done explaining himself to you. Not bitter about it. Not wounded. Just done.

Roll the windows down. Let it play.