Behind the Album: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Reunited—with Jeff Lynne in the Fold—for ‘Into the Great Wide Open’
Tom Petty enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Jeff Lynne in the late ’80s and early ’90s that included two Traveling Wilburys albums and Petty’s incredibly successful solo record Full Moon Fever. When he decided to reunite the Heartbreakers for the 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open, he brought Lynne along as a producer.
The result is a hybrid album that sounds like nothing else in the Heartbreakers’ catalog. Let’s look back at how it all came together and how the participants involved sometimes struggled with the arrangement.
Petty, Lynne, and a Band in Waiting
A chance encounter between Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne on a Los Angeles street one afternoon turned into a deep friendship and lucrative working relationship. They had already met briefly in London in the company of George Harrison, but the LA meetup was pure chance and, seemingly, fate. The timing couldn’t have been better, as both men were struggling with the constraints of being bandleaders. Lynne had thoughts of focusing on production after shelving ELO, and Petty, a huge fan of Lynne’s work, thought they should work together.
That led to Full Moon Fever, which indirectly led to The Traveling Wilburys. A lot of great music was being made by Petty and Lynne, often as co-writers. As the 1980s turned to the ’90s, Petty wasn’t too keen on stopping this productive partnership anytime soon. The only problem was there was a band of his that was waiting around for his return.
In actuality, the men of the Heartbreakers hadn’t been idly sitting on their hands after Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), the last band album before Petty went solo in 1987. They were all in-demand session men. In one interesting quirk, the 1990 Grammys pitted Full Moon Fever against Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence, which featured major contributions from Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch, for Album of the Year. (Both lost to Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time.
Petty knew it was time to get the Heartbreakers back together. But he also wanted to keep his stretch of working with Lynne intact. The solution: Have Lynne produce the next Heartbreakers record, which would be entitled Into the Great Wide Open.
