It begins with almost nothing. A strummed acoustic guitar, a voice that sounds tired but not beaten, and a melody so simple it feels like something you have always known. When Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released “Learning to Fly” in June 1991, it did not announce itself with a guitar hero’s flourish or a stadium-sized chorus. It just walked in, four chords wide, and told the truth: that getting up is easy compared with coming down. Within weeks it was the most-played rock song in America. More than thirty years later, it is still the song Petty’s audiences sang back to him, word for word, and the song other singers reach for when they want to say goodbye to him properly. The story of “Learning to Fly” is the story of a man who had lost his house to fire, his band to a solo detour, and his country to a televised war — and who answered all of it with the gentlest, most stubborn record of his career.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Tom Petty stood in 1991. He was not a newcomer, and he was not, in the ordinary sense, in trouble. He was one of America’s most reliable rock stars, a Florida kid turned Los Angeles veteran with a string of hits behind him and a band, the Heartbreakers, that had been with him since the mid-1970s. But the ground under him had shifted. In May 1987 an arsonist had burned down his house in Encino, California, destroying nearly everything he owned and leaving him, his wife and his family standing outside watching their life turn to ash; nobody was ever charged for the fire, and Petty rarely spoke about it in detail. Then came the solo detour: Full Moon Fever, his 1989 debut solo album, had been a runaway success, but it had also raised an awkward question — did the Heartbreakers still have a future, or had their frontman outgrown them? And all around him, in early 1991, the television was full of the Gulf War: bombing raids, burning oil wells, pilots in cockpits, a war presented as clean technology while the smoke told a different story. Petty was, by his own later account, disappointed by the war and by the mood of the country around it, and that grey, smoky feeling went straight into the new album. “Learning to Fly” was the first thing the world heard from it, and it sounded like a man deciding, deliberately, to be hopeful anyway.
The song itself began with a television interview and a pilot’s throwaway wisdom. Petty later told the story the same way for years, and it never changed, which is usually a good sign. He was watching a pilot being interviewed, and the pilot said that learning to fly was not really the hard part. The hard part, the pilot said, was coming down. That line stuck. Petty had already written most of the words and had a tune in his head, and he took the idea to Jeff Lynne, his friend and collaborator from the Traveling Wilburys and the producer of Full Moon Fever. Petty sang Lynne the tune, Lynne worked out what chords fitted underneath it, and the two men finished the song together in a single evening — fast, even by their standards, because the song already knew what it wanted to say. Petty was always clear about the division of labour: he started it and had it mostly going, and Lynne came in and helped with the chords. What they ended up with was a song built on just four chords — F, C, A minor and G, played over and over — and a lyric that refuses to dress its meaning up. The singer starts out down a dirty road, all alone, and admits the plain fact of the chorus: he is learning to fly, but he has not got wings, and coming down is the hardest thing. It is not a song about triumph. It is a song about the attempt.
The recording captures that modesty in sound, and it is worth describing carefully, because the record’s lightness is the result of very deliberate craft. “Learning to Fly” was cut for Into the Great Wide Open, the band’s eighth studio album, at Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park, California, with additional work at guitarist Mike Campbell’s home studio, and it was produced by Petty and Lynne together, with engineer Richard Dodd — the same team that had made Full Moon Fever shimmer. Petty had wanted Lynne, who had produced his solo record, to work on the next Heartbreakers album, and he had to persuade his longtime band that an outsider at the production desk was a good idea. The result was a record that sounds like both worlds at once: the Heartbreakers’ bar-band heart, polished with Lynne’s trademark clarity. Campbell later described the track to Rolling Stone as a Jeff Lynne production through and through: tons of acoustic guitars, layered really thick, strumming away, with a little drum break at the end that Campbell loved. The personnel tells the story of how the sound was built. Petty sings lead and backing vocals and plays acoustic guitar. Campbell stacks electric, acoustic and twelve-string guitars — that ringing twelve-string is the sound most listeners remember first, a direct echo of the Byrds-influenced jangle of “Free Fallin’.” Howie Epstein adds the backing vocals that make the chorus feel like a small town singing along. Stan Lynch plays drums, but notably without a kick drum on the track; Lynne himself fills the low end and the shimmer, playing bass, acoustic guitar, an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer, an Oberheim DMX drum machine and sampler, and adding backing vocals. It is a studio construction, openly so, and that is part of its charm: a song about learning to fly, built by a band and a producer learning, together, how to sound like a band again.
The single’s chart story is a happy one, and it deserves to be told precisely, because one detail of it has been misreported — including, at first, in the brief for this article. “Learning to Fly” was released on June 17, 1991, by MCA Records, as the first single from Into the Great Wide Open, backed with “Too Good to Be True,” and it was a genuine hit on two different charts at once. On Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart — the rock-radio chart, now called Mainstream Rock — it went to number one and stayed there for six weeks, equalling the run of Petty’s 1981 single “The Waiting” and becoming his most successful single ever on that chart. And contrary to the claim that it never touched the pop chart, it most certainly did: it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated June 29, 1991, at number 87, climbed through July, broke into the Top 40 in early August, and peaked at number 28 on August 24, 1991, spending five weeks inside the Top 40 and fourteen weeks on the Hot 100 in total. Abroad it was a smaller hit — it debuted at number 65 on the UK Singles Chart, peaked at number 46 the following week, and spent four weeks in the British Top 75 — but in America it did exactly what a lead single is supposed to do. The album around it, released in July 1991, peaked at number 13 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum. For a song with four chords and a shrug for a chorus, that is a remarkable return.
Its afterlife began on television, in a video that understood the song better than most videos understand their songs. Julien Temple, who had also directed Petty’s “Free Fallin'” video, directed the “Learning to Fly” clip, and he shot it in the most literal landscape the song could have asked for: the airplane boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, where the carcasses of countless aircraft sit bleaching in the desert, with additional filming at a Tucson club. The band spent a day balanced on the wings of stripped-down planes in intense desert heat while Temple waited out cloudy weather, and the finished video follows a boy through the small milestones of adolescence — the moments when a kid earns, or imagines he earns, his wings — intercut with the band perched on aircraft that will never leave the ground again. It is a video about grounded flight, which is exactly what the song is about. There is a good story attached to the shoot that is often told wrong, so it is worth getting right: while the band was filming in Tucson, Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway, who were nearby working on the film Arizona Dream, wandered into Petty’s trailer, and Petty promptly cast them — not in the “Learning to Fly” video, but in the video for the album’s title track, “Into the Great Wide Open,” where Depp plays Eddie Rebel, the small-town kid with a tattoo and a one-way ticket to fame. The two videos are companions, but they are not the same film, and Dunaway belongs to the second one.
The song’s longer afterlife has been quieter than its chart run, and in some ways more impressive. It never left Petty’s live set. At his concerts he would often step back from the microphone during the chorus and let the audience sing it for him, and they always did — a roomful of people, many of whom had their own reasons for knowing what coming down feels like, taking over a song about exactly that. Petty himself said, years later, that it had remained one of the band’s most popular songs, one people still requested for films and still wanted to hear in the show, and that people embraced it in a way that surprised even him. Some listeners have heard the song as a coded account of addiction — the ups, the crash, the hard landing — and Petty never fully closed that reading down; he preferred to let the song stay open, a vessel for whatever hard landing its listener was living through. What is certain is that the song outlived its moment. After Petty’s death in October 2017, his Traveling Wilburys bandmate Bob Dylan paid tribute by covering “Learning to Fly” live in concert in Broomfield, Colorado, on October 21, 2017 — one day after what would have been Petty’s 67th birthday — a performance critics called one of the finest Petty covers ever given. Dylan, who had sung harmonies beside Petty in the Wilburys, sang his friend’s gentlest song back to a room that needed it.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the four chords. Most hit singles work hard to impress you: a key change, a modulation, a middle eight that shows off. “Learning to Fly” does none of that. It plays F, C, A minor and G, and then it plays them again, and it trusts that a true sentence, sung plainly over a true chord change, is enough. That trust is the whole of Tom Petty’s art, really — the belief that a rock song does not have to be complicated to be serious, and that understatement, held long enough, becomes its own kind of grandeur. The song was written in an evening, from a pilot’s remark on television and a tune Petty already had in his head, in a year when his house was already ash, his band was an open question, and his television was full of burning oil. It answered all of that not with anger, though anger would have been fair, but with a shrug and a vow: I am learning to fly, I have not got wings, and coming down is the hardest thing. It is not a promise that the landing will be soft. It is a promise that the attempt is worth making anyway.
That is why “Learning to Fly” still works, more than thirty years later, for listeners who have never bought Into the Great Wide Open and never will. It is not Tom Petty’s biggest hit, and it was never trying to be. It is the one that tells the truth about starting over after a fire, after a war, after a career fork in the road: that you do not get wings first and fly second, that the order is the other way around, and that the hardest part is not the dreaming but the landing. The charts gave it six weeks at number one on rock radio and a Top 30 place on the Hot 100. The desert gave it a boneyard full of grounded planes. And the audiences, night after night, gave it the rest: thousands of voices, singing a chorus about not having wings, and sounding, for four chords at a time, airborne.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the twelve-string first rings out over the acoustic strum, and the chorus arrives like a shrug that turns into a vow. It is the sound of a man who had watched his house burn and his country go to war, and who decided, anyway, to learn to fly — and of a band that learned, in four chords, how to be a band again.