‘Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)’: The album that made Tom Petty want to break up the Heartbreakers
(Credit: Alamy)
Sun 30 November 2025 16:00, UK
It was going to take a lot to pull Tom Petty away from rock and roll.
He lived and breathed every single note he ever played, and he wouldn’t be caught dead trying to make something tacky that the label insisted that he make. He was far more interested in following his own muse all the time, but when the muse stops talking to you, there comes where anyone would feel like they had officially dried up.
If you think about the career trajectory that Petty had, though, there was no reason for him to think that things were waning. He had one of the greatest bands of all time at his disposal, and even when things didn’t work out on albums like Southern Accents, the results were still absolutely beautiful for what they were. When the band got the opportunity to work with Bob Dylan, that was something that no one could turn down.
This was a breeding ground for some of the greatest rock and roll players in the world, and when listening to those gigs, a lot of the spontaneity is what made everything sound so urgent at every show. Anyone would have come off that stage thinking that they had killed it every single night, so if anyone made it through that kind of trial-by-fire scenario, surely an entire record of nothing but that energy could be just as exciting, right?
Well, not really. Petty would have loved to play with Dylan for the rest of his life, but when it came to the studio, he wanted to be a technician in the same vein as artists like The Beatles. The soundscapes that he was after weren’t the kind of thing that could be done onstage, and when looking at the record Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), Petty knew that the title was much more than a cheeky pun.
When talking about that time, guitarist Mike Campbell remembered how frustrated Petty was and how close he came to walking away from The Heartbreakers, saying, “I remember having a conversation with Tom around that period. And I guess he was in a down state for whatever reason, and he called me up goes, ‘You know, I think I’ve had enough.’ I go, “What do you mean?” He says, ‘Well, I don’t know, I think maybe it’s time to put a bow on it.’ And I go, ‘What are you talking about? You’re going to break up the band?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I don’t know. It might be time.’”
There’s definitely that sense of frustration on much of the album, but it actually works in the record’s favour in a lot of ways. Petty is clearly frustrated trying to juggle both sides of his sound, but there was also a bit of fire in him when he’s singing the title track that balances out pretty well with the more mellow tunes on the rest of the album like ‘All Mixed Up’ or ‘Runaway Trains’.
As it turned out, the only thing that Petty needed was a break from the band. He could keep Campbell by his side all he wanted, but listening back to Full Moon Fever and then Into the Great Wide Open, you could tell that he was refreshed from all that time away and working with the Traveling Wilburys that he finally rediscovered his love for playing again on tunes like ‘Learning to Fly’.
While Stan Lynch ended up getting lost in the lurch a little bit, the reason why an album like Wildflowers sounds so good in retrospect has a lot to do with that break away from the band. It wasn’t going to be any fun for the rest of the band to sit and wait for Petty to be ready to jam again, but if they had continued to make records while he was burnt out, there was no way they would have survived as long as they did.
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