"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
And this week I'm back to one of the obvious ones. This is a song, and an artist, that I tried to fit into the This Year series, but it just didn't go.
(This song was from 1976, and the other 1976 songs that I couldn't make fit were the transcendent live version of Richard and Linda Thompson's Calvary Cross and the inimitable Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. As it was, the song I had for that year was the Eagles' The Last Resort, a song that's much more personally important to me.)
But Better Things is not tied to the calendar, and can celebrate great songs wherever they fell. So, this week, it's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with what I think was their first world-class song, American Girl. (You could make an argument for Breakdown, which is earlier on the same record and was released as a single earlier. But I think American Girl is bigger, stronger, longer-lasting, more iconic.)
As usual with my favorites, it's not a happy song.
God it's so painful
Something that's so close
And still so far out of reach
The urban legend is not true: it's not about a suicide. We can assume from that, from what Petty said about the song, that she got through this - the sad, depressive, hopeless moment catalogued in the song - and went on with her life.
And that's one of the things this song is about - going on, continuing, even after heartbreak.
Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl
Maybe the way to take that "was" isn't to think of her as gone. Maybe she's just less innocent, more battered by life, wiser, older. Maybe what's gone is the "girl."
