VIDEO: Tom Petty’s “For Real” Covers Late Singer’s Remarkable Career
One of the highlights from the recently released Tom Petty career retrospective The Best of Everything is the previously unreleased track “For Real,” a deeply personal song where Petty dives deep into how he felt about his life as a musician. Thanks to his daughter, Adria Petty, at the helm as director, the song now has a moving video.
The video for “For Real” acts a timeline of sorts and shows Petty throughout his career and includes some major highlights, including his Super Bowl halftime performance with the Heartbreakers.
Adria has been going through her father’s extensive archives and told Rolling Stone that when she first came across “For Real” that, “It hit me pretty hard the first time I heard it. I was told he wrote in his hotel room the night before, and it feels very raw and sincere. It really stood out as something pretty profound, sort of from the grave, right? Just a real assessment of his strange reality of being a living legend. It touches on the things my dad believed in, his core values, like being authentic and not just being part of the pastiche of pop culture.”
As for making the video, Adria added, “I was crying my eyes out every night during the edit, but he raised me to finish my sh-t. There was work to do and you had to get it done.”
More projects seem to be in the works using material from Petty’s archives, which Adria said, “…In the last year and a half, there’s been an awful lot of stuff to take the time to dig into. We haven’t even listened to one percent of that yet…You look at the amount of unreleased music and every interview he did, and you say, ‘How did you find the time? You were only alive 66 years. There’s so many more years of work here!’ Sometimes I feel a little sad thinking, ‘No wonder you weren’t home — you were busy working your ass off.'”
Erica Banas is rock/classic rock news blogger that loves the smell of old vinyl in the morning.