10 Greatest Comeback Albums In Rock
6. Full Moon Fever - Tom Petty
The entire career trajectory behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was always more reliable on radio than anything else. By the time that they got to recording records like Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) though, even Tom had started to wonder what he was doing though, thinking that he was spinning his wheels rather than actually putting out something with a lot of heart. He needed to rediscover the joy of making music, and that meant leaving some of his fellow Heartbreakers behind for a while.
Reenergized after working with the Traveling Wilburys, Tom didn't want to quit just yet, hanging out with Jeff Lynne from ELO and putting together an album just before he was due to return to England. Working out of Mike Campbell's studio, Full Moon Fever is a much more organic take on Tom's music than what we had gotten with the Heartbreakers, sounding like the whole thing could have been captured on a random weekend where everyone was passing around guitars.
Some of these songs might not have worked as Heartbreakers tracks either, with a song like Yer So Bad or A Face in the Crowd working better with the more layered sounds that you got out of Lynne's production style. The entire music world was already in a state of change in 1989, but when you listened to a song like Free Fallin for the first time, the clock seemed to stop for just a little bit.