Make It Better (Forget About Me)

Make It Better (Forget About Me) — Tom Petty's Underestimated Single

Southern Rock's Stubborn Individualist

By the summer of 1985, Tom Petty had been making records for a decade and had established himself as one of the most consistently excellent artists in American rock. His band, the Heartbreakers, was as good as any rock ensemble of the era: tight without being mechanical, raw without being sloppy, built around the kind of collective instinct that only years of playing together can produce. Petty himself had cultivated a public identity as a working-class rocker who valued artistic integrity over commercial calculation, someone who had famously fought his record label over pricing and won.

That identity was accurate as far as it went, but it sometimes obscured the considerable sophistication of his songwriting and the genuine range of his musical sensibility. Southern Accents, the album from which Make It Better (Forget About Me) was drawn, was one of his most ambitious records, a thematic concept work about the American South that reached toward something more literary and emotionally complex than straightforward rock and roll.

The Album and Its Ambitions

Southern Accents was released in 1985, and it arrived with the kind of weight that Petty did not always court. The album grappled with Southern American identity, with the mythology and the reality of a region that American culture perpetually mythologizes and misunderstands in equal measure. The songs ranged across that territory with genuine curiosity and emotional honesty, drawing on country, rock, and blue-eyed soul traditions without settling comfortably into any of them.

Make It Better (Forget About Me) was a quieter entry in that thematic project, a song about emotional withdrawal and the strange self-protective logic of romantic retreat. The production gave it a slightly melancholy spaciousness that suited the album's overall mood, with the Heartbreakers providing the kind of economical, attentive support that characterizes their best work.

A Modest but Real Chart Presence

The single entered the Billboard chart on June 8, 1985, beginning a climb that was steady if not spectacular. It reached its peak of number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 by July 6, a positioning that placed it in the mid-tier of that summer's chart action without breaking through to the level of radio saturation that Petty's biggest singles achieved. The record spent eight weeks on the chart, a run that reflected consistent if not overwhelming radio support.

These numbers were not unusual for album-track singles from established artists in 1985, particularly from albums with thematic complexity that required more investment from the listener than a straightforward pop single. The record served its purpose in the album cycle without becoming a career-defining moment.

The Heartbreakers Behind the Record

What elevates Make It Better (Forget About Me) beyond its chart position is the quality of the performance. The Heartbreakers in 1985 were a band at a particular kind of peak: experienced enough to know exactly when to hold back, confident enough not to oversell any moment. The guitar work is measured and expressive, the rhythm section steady without drawing attention to itself, the whole arrangement in service of the song's emotional logic rather than showcasing any individual's virtuosity.

Petty's vocal sits comfortably in the register where he was most natural, slightly weary, clearly intelligent, not asking for sympathy but not pretending to be above needing it.

The Value of the Mid-Catalog

Not every Tom Petty single was a classic rock radio staple, and the ones that were not reveal as much about his artistry as the ones that were. Make It Better (Forget About Me) shows a craftsman working at a level of care and nuance that commercial success does not require and that the market often fails to reward. Its underperformance relative to his biggest hits says nothing about its quality; it says something about the difficulty of translating genuine artistic ambition into radio currency.

Put it on and hear what Tom Petty sounded like when he was working harder than the chart position suggests he needed to.

“Make It Better (Forget About Me)” — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' singular moment on the 1980s charts.