Brendan recommends “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty
Learning to Fly
We start out alone, for God knows where. We don’t know until we get there, if we get there at all. We attempt to fly knowing full well that most of the time, we can’t, that we won’t. That eventually, we will plummet back to earth. Tom Petty warned us: Coming down is the hardest thing.
A few years ago, my ex-fiancée and I were driving back to New York from a weekend trip to D.C. where we’d been visiting friends. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I fished out Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open from the center console of my beat-up Pathfinder, fed the cassette into the tape deck. I remember simply thinking it had been years since I had purposefully listened to Petty. I’d encounter his songs in passing, the way we do with artists so canonical they seem woven into the very fabric of American life: piped in tinnily at the gas station, soundtracking detergent purchases, on the radio sandwiched between Don McLean and an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts. Even if I wasn’t consciously thinking it, I knew Petty was always there, reliable and true, like the roads that lead us to and away from each other. So when the tape whirred to life and the chiming opening chords of “Learning to Fly” rang from my car speakers, I felt like I had settled into a dialogue with a trusted friend. And I discovered that, if you hit the right speed on the highway, the steady click of the white lines matches the pulse of the rhythm section.
There’s a bruised nakedness to Petty’s voice in “Learning to Fly.” Life has beaten him down, broken his heart, stolen his crown. But the song is his salvation. Survival, he seems to be telling us, is in the learning, even if learning is often a nice way of saying failing.
My ex and I ran the tape back for just about the entire four-hour ride back to New York City, Petty our champion and companion. Looking back, it’s obvious to me now that cracks had already begun to work their way into our relationship; we were growing apart. People sometimes ask me what led to the split, as if it would be possible to point to a single thing. I could say we met too young. I could say our anxieties were jagged puzzle pieces that would never lock together. I could say, with no small amount of regret, that attempting flight—in my case, writing fiction—absorbed an outsized portion of my emotional well. And all of these things would be true. Petty, then, was the ideal road trip mate, music to lose ourselves in, a proxy for the intense yearning we both felt but which we could no longer satiate with each other.
The very next day, news broke that Tom Petty was dead. The timing felt impossible, too strange to be true. How could this be? I had just rediscovered one of my heroes and now he was gone? Petty would come through New York City seemingly every year with his band to play Madison Square Garden or the Beacon Theatre and I always flinched at the ticket prices, which climbed into three digits. Next tour, I’d tell myself, for sure.
It’s easy to forget just how many indelible songs Tom Petty has written. He has albums full of tracks that would be the crowning achievement in another artist’s entire career. Yet “Learning to Fly” has always been my favorite, the one I return to most often, in both writing and in life. The part I love most in the song is the ramshackle bridge about three-quarters of the way through. It’s a four-bar breakdown, less than ten seconds of release. The scramble of drums, the jangle and scatter of the rhythm guitar. And then Petty lets the moment take him: “EY!” he shouts, as though he can’t hold himself back, as though for just a second, he is flying, or feels the thrill of takeoff at the very least, until a few seconds later, there’s an earthbound slide of electric guitar, and then we’re back to the chorus, learning together once more.
It looks different for all of us, the search for the EY!. The perfect sear. The ping of the club. The swish of the net. A brief moment of flight like the flutter you get in your stomach when you go over a dip in the car. If I can catch myself off-guard long enough to thread a few moments like that together, boy, I’m really on to something. But too often, those flashes happen fleetingly and when I least expect them, and usually they have very little to do with my efforts at all. Maybe, then, learning to fly is really learning to let yourself go long enough to let the moment guide you, the same ineffable force that nudged Petty in the studio as he yelped a weightless syllable over the four-bar bridge. It’s the search for transformation, for the fleeting instance where you forget who you are, or, more optimistically, become the person you want to be.
My relationship ended shortly before COVID-19 upended reality. Long months of more-or-less solitary isolation forced me to confront myself in ways I wasn’t entirely prepared for, or, frankly, equipped to handle. Anxiety and depression, I’ve become increasingly aware, have been a part of me since long before I had the vocabulary to understand or articulate them. Maddening brain chatter, like a radio that never switches off. The urgency to disappear into work as a way to hide from pain. The fear of failure, of never being enough. The fear that the fear will never go away. All of which looks remarkably trivial on paper when the edges can feel so sharp in my skull. Searching for the EY! is my way of trying to make sense of these things, to be present in a way that the ache of memory or the wooly static of anxiety often prevent me from experiencing in life. If I can learn to be present on the page, perhaps I can carry that feeling of vulnerability into the everyday.
I wish Tom Petty was still around to help me make sense of the recent past: the failure of a relationship upon which I thought my future would be built, an internal war with the ugliest parts of myself, the courage to stare them down. Something tells me he’d lend some hard-earned wisdom in that wounded, resilient voice of his. Or he might point right back to “Learning to Fly.” Life can beat us down, break our hearts and steal our crown, but if we can allow ourselves to be open enough to learn, bold enough to fail, brave enough to peel back our skin for just a moment to feel the raw sting of life, it’s in that fleeting instant that healing can begin.
Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His work appears, or will appear, in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, HAD, X-R-A-Y, Expat, South Carolina Review, Longleaf Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, I've Given This a Lot of Thought, is available now via Bottlecap Press. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July '24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter @beegillen.
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