10 Best Rock And Roll Breakup Albums

Divorces are always bound to be messy even if you aren't one of the biggest stars in the world. Untangling yourself from another person is never a pleasant experience, especially if you've been able to muscle through some of your greatest hardships together. Tom Petty may have been tough as nails whenever he stepped behind a microphone, but Echo was the one album where he seemed to be truly lost.

Although Wildflowers is the one album where Tom started to see cracks in his marriage, this record is really the aftermath of all that pain, taking each song as a way of comforting himself, whether that means begging for his wife to take him back on Room at the Top or knowing just how alone he's going to feel once this is all over on the title track. There might have been a lot of sore wounds on this album, but the real carnage was happening right in front of the band's eyes whenever they went into the studio.

Around the same time that Tom was secluding himself from the rest of the world, bassist Howie Epstein was slowly losing himself to heroin addiction, going further and further into denial and barely playing on the album before passing away just a few years later. The Heartbreakers have always felt like a unit both on and off the stage, but this was the first time where there was legitimate fear about how long these good times were going to last.