10 Biggest Mistakes In Rock Music History
8. Here Comes My Girl - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
By the time that the Heartbreakers had gotten around to making Damn the Torpedoes, their backs had already been against the wall for a while. After being ripped off by their management for songwriting copyrights, they were in the midst of a legal battle for their songs by day and going into Sound City and pumping out classics by night. And if you thought that legal BS would be frustrating, you could imagine how their spouses felt.
Towards the end of the song Here Comes My Girl, there's a random female voice that comes in before it kicks into Even the Losers. Though Tom has indulged in some playful banter on his records many times, this was the first one that was a complete accident. Since guitarist Mike Campbell brought in the demo for Here Comes My Girl, that's actually the voice of his wife at home.
As Campbell tells it, he was actually working out the chord progression for Here Comes My Girl when he yelled down to his wife if she could hear any difference in the sound quality, to which she responded "it's just the normal noises in here." Apparently this kind of thing cracked up Petty so much that he decided to splice it in at the end of the take. To answer her question though, the album is definitely noisy, but it's anything but normal.