September Album of the Month: Tom Petty's Greatest Hits

While I am generally of the opinion that greatest hits albums are for, "housewives and little girls", every once in a while, there is a greatest hits album of such transcendent perfection, one that manages to both showcase the highlights of an artist's career while also working as a cohesive work in and of itself that it defies convention.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits is just such a collection.

The album covers the first 15 years of Petty's career, one where his singles tended to overshadow the albums that they were drawn from.  Granted, Damn the Torpedoes is a fine album, in fact, 4 songs from that very album are included on Greatest Hits, but, among the remaining 5 songs, there aren't exactly any buried treasures waiting to be discovered. I would even argue that Torpedoes isn't even his best album; that title goes to 1994's Wildflowers.

In any case, Greatest Hits is a showcase for Petty's instincts as a master of pop song-craft.  It contains anthem after anthem and we even get a taste of experimentation with the classic, "Don't Come Around Here No More." As a nice added bonus, we get the wonderful "Mary Jane's Last Dance"; sure, the video got overplayed but it gave us the first taste of the Tom Petty/Rick Rubin collaboration that would ultimately produce Wildflowers. So, sorry Bruce McCulloch, I gotta go with the Greatest Hits for my favorite Tom Petty album.  

Key Tracks: All of them, it is a greatest hits album, but, most especially: "American Girl", "Refugee", "The Waiting", "You Got Lucky", "Don't Come Around Here No More", "I Won't Back Down", "Free Fallin'", "Mary Jane's Last Dance"