My Top 1000 Songs #693: Here Comes My Girl
[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]
I have VERY mixed feelings about "Here Comes My Girl," off Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' ridiculously hit-laden 1979 breakthrough Damn The Torpedoes.
On the one hand, I kinda really really hate the verses, those spoken-word bits where a gritty-voiced Petty moans about how cruel the world is and everything is ugly except the titular girl. It just gives me the wiggins, you know? (Though the verses are salvaged by that electric guitar hook, a little jolt that accents each line.) But then, just as each verse crescendos with what I find a terribly grating barrage of guttural moans, you get...
That chorus!
And not even the whole chorus. Just that one title line, the tension of those verses sliding into a buttery smooth "Here comes my girl," with Benmont Tench's gorgeous piano lines, and it's like... heaven? But better?
Maybe the verses need to be so grating, just to make that chorus line all the more absolutely devastating by contrast. If you could just bottle the way it feels when Petty sings those words and hand it out to random strangers, the world would be a brighter place.
Live:So, this is like a dozen times that one of the songs on this list has shown up on those Matthew Sweet/Susanna Hoffs tribute albums (and, yes, Hoffs' vocals on the chorus just destroy me):
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