Learning To Fly

"Learning to Fly": Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Find a New Altitude

The View from the Top of a Career

By 1991, Tom Petty had been making records for fifteen years and had nothing left to prove to anyone. His catalogue included some of the most enduring rock singles of the 1970s and 1980s, his work with the Traveling Wilburys had introduced him to audiences who had somehow missed his solo career, and his 1989 solo album Full Moon Fever had sold millions. Then came Into the Great Wide Open, the Heartbreakers album that produced "Learning to Fly," and what was striking about the song was precisely its humility. Here was a veteran artist at the height of his commercial visibility writing about the uncertainty of beginning, about not knowing whether you would get where you were trying to go. That choice took a quiet kind of courage. Most artists in his position would have reached for something more obviously triumphant; Petty went the other direction and found something more durable.

The Sound of Open Country

The track has a spaciousness that matches its subject matter: Petty's guitars ring without crowding each other, the rhythm section provides a solid floor without pressing down on the melody, and the vocal delivery is measured and plain in the way that his best performances always were. Producer Jeff Lynne, who had worked with Petty on Full Moon Fever, brought the same bright, slightly retro sonic character to this record, a clean sound that served the songs without calling attention to itself. The production breathes, which is part of why the song feels like the landscape it describes; open, uncertain, and wide enough to hold your anxieties without amplifying them into something unmanageable.

A Steady Climb Through the Summer

The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 29, 1991, at position 87, then climbed patiently through the summer: 77, 67, 60, 51. It reached its peak of number 28 on August 24, 1991, spending 14 weeks on the chart. Those numbers put it in the middle register of Petty's chart history, considerably below the peaks of his biggest hits, but the song's impact was never primarily a function of chart position. It was a track that became a radio staple through genuine listener affection, passed from one person to another by recommendation rather than by promotional saturation alone. People who discovered it kept it: that is a different kind of chart success than the kind manufactured by morning-drive radio hammering a single into reluctant familiarity.

The Album Track That Became an Anthem

Radio programmers discovered that listeners responded to the song with an enthusiasm disproportionate to its chart performance, and it became one of those tracks that accumulate meaning through repetition and context rather than through a single dominant moment. Sports broadcasts, film soundtracks, and television scenes of aspiration and departure have returned to it repeatedly over the decades since its release. The song became a shorthand for a specific emotional state: the mixture of nervousness and exhilaration that accompanies any genuine new beginning, whether it involves an airplane or not.

99 Million Views and a Song That Never Ages

The song has gathered 99 million YouTube views, a total built largely by listeners who return to it at moments of personal transition. Petty died in October 2017, and the outpouring of affection that followed confirmed how central his work had become to people's sense of what American rock music could be at its most honest and unaffected. "Learning to Fly" is among his most beloved songs for exactly those reasons. Press play whenever a new road opens in front of you, and let the guitars tell you that the uncertainty is acceptable and the attempt is worthwhile.

"Learning to Fly" -- Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers' singular moment on the 1990s charts.