Every deep catalog has a sleeper, but few have slept like this. Love Is a Long Road was never released as a single. In Britain it was the B-side of Free Fallin’; in America it backed Yer So Bad. For three decades it lived as a beloved album track on Full Moon Fever, known to Petty devotees and classic-rock radio programmers, and to almost no one else. It had no video, no single, no campaign — nothing but a motorcycle’s momentum and a chorus that sounded like an open highway feels at midnight. Then, in December 2023, ninety-one seconds of video game trailer turned it into one of the most streamed rock songs on the planet, its Spotify count leaping from under five million to nearly forty million. This is the story of how a motorcycle ride in 1988 became the sound of the biggest entertainment launch of the 2020s.
The Solo Album That Kept the Band in the Room
Full Moon Fever, released on April 24, 1989, was Petty’s first solo album — though “solo” was always a relative term. Produced with Jeff Lynne and Mike Campbell and recorded largely in Campbell’s garage studio, it featured nearly all of the Heartbreakers in some capacity; drummer Stan Lynch was the only member who did not appear. Campbell, the one Heartbreaker on every track, remembered the sessions fondly: Petty had brought him into the fold when he did not have to, and “it was like going to musical college.” The project had started almost as a lark between Petty, Lynne and Campbell — three friends making records in a garage while Petty’s Wilburys fame crested — and MCA’s executives initially had no idea what to do with it, sitting on the finished album before the Traveling Wilburys’ success made Petty’s instincts impossible to argue with. When it finally appeared, Full Moon Fever became the commercial peak of his career, a record where every song sounded like a single. Which made the fate of this particular track — a single in everything but designation — all the more curious.
On most of the album, Lynne’s gleaming production polished Petty’s songs toward pop. Love Is a Long Road went the other way. Petty was candid about the intent: he wanted at least one song on the record that sounded like the Heartbreakers. “That’s really just us kind of doing an imitation of the band,” he told BAM magazine — deliberately leaning into the jangle and thrust of the group sound, with Howie Epstein brought in on backing vocals because, as Petty put it, “Sounds to me like Howie should do that, so let’s get him.”
A Motorcycle Shifting Gears
The song began with Campbell and his motorcycle. “I was really into that frame of mind,” the guitarist told Rolling Stone. “This feels like a motorcycle shifting gears.” The demo the pair cut was, by their own account, chaotic; Lynne, co-producing with Petty and Campbell, helped them smooth the arrangement into the finished record’s relentless surge without sanding off its danger. You can hear the motorcycle in the result: the track keeps lunging forward, changing up, all momentum and open road — a synthesizer-and-guitar surge that mimics an engine working through its range — with session great Jim Keltner on drums and maracas and Petty singing about a love affair with a wild, untamable boy headed for a broken heart; the narrator watches the wreck coming and stays anyway. There is a quiet poignancy in the credits: Howie Epstein, whose backing vocal helps make the track feel like the Heartbreakers at full stretch, was the band’s bassist through their imperial years, and his presence here is a reminder that Full Moon Fever was never really a defection. It was the band, reconvened in a garage, with a friend producing. AllMusic heard in the song a stripped-down descendant of the Who’s Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again and called it one of the most powerful rockers on the album. Rolling Stone later ranked it at No. 38 on its list of Petty’s 50 greatest songs.
Life on the Flipside
Radio, to its credit, found the song anyway. Despite its B-side status, Love Is a Long Road drew enough album-rock airplay in 1989 to reach No. 7 on Billboard‘s Album Rock Tracks chart — an impressive showing for a song nobody could buy on its own. When the band assembled their 1993 Greatest Hits, the Full Moon Fever slots went to the hits, and the song was passed over; it was rescued instead by the archivists, surfacing on the Playback box set in 1995 and the Anthology: Through the Years double disc in 2000, where a generation of completists discovered it between the anthems. There its story seemed settled: a first-rate deep cut, permanently in the shadow of Free Fallin’, I Won’t Back Down and Runnin’ Down a Dream from the same album. Petty died on October 2, 2017, with the song still exactly that — respected, anthologized, and known almost exclusively to people who already loved him. The resurrection, when it came, would not be driven by nostalgia at all. It would be driven by people who had never bought a record in their lives, pressing play on a video game trailer, in numbers no 1989 marketing department could have imagined.
Ninety-One Seconds in Leonida
On December 4, 2023, Rockstar Games released the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI a day early, after a leak forced its hand. The 91-second clip introduced the fictional state of Leonida — Rockstar’s fevered take on Florida — and it was scored, wall to wall, with Love Is a Long Road. The fit was perfect to the point of eeriness: a Gainesville songwriter’s song about the long road of a doomed love, soundtracking a star-crossed couple’s return to a Florida-inspired Vice City, complete with an in-joke “Petty Forever” sticker rendered in the Full Moon Fever cover’s colors. The trailer drew more than 93 million views in its first 24 hours, setting a Guinness World Record for a video game trailer launch, and passed 250 million views by April 2025. Petty’s estate embraced the moment — and so did a global audience that included millions who had never knowingly heard a Tom Petty song. For the length of that trailer, the B-side became the biggest song in the world.
The numbers that followed were unlike anything in the streaming era. Spotify confirmed the song’s streams surged by 36,979 percent. Within a few months its total had climbed from under five million plays to nearly forty million, and it entered Billboard‘s Rock Digital Song Sales chart at No. 7 — a chart debut, of a kind, thirty-four years after release. The choice was not accidental. The trailer introduces Lucia and Jason, a young couple bound together in a life of Florida crime — a partnership the song’s lyric, about a woman who stands by a man she knows is trouble, fits like a glove. Rockstar, whose soundtracks have been famous for two decades for rescuing exactly this kind of deep cut, had reached past a dozen bigger Petty hits to the one song whose story matched its own. When the second trailer arrived in May 2025, it was the Pointer Sisters’ turn, their Hot Together exploding by an even more absurd percentage — but by then Love Is a Long Road had already done something rarer than spike: it had stuck. Nor was it a one-week wonder: Official Charts data showed that eleven months later the song’s average weekly sales were still running at more than eighteen times their pre-trailer level, while consumption of Petty’s albums overall was up 42 percent. It was not even Petty’s first ride with the franchise — Runnin’ Down a Dream had cruised the radio of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas back in 2004 — but this was something else entirely: a generation of players meeting Tom Petty for the first time, through a song his own label had once consigned to a B-side.
The Long Road Indeed
With Grand Theft Auto VI now scheduled for release in November 2026, the song’s second life is still unfolding, and millions of players will hear it in the game itself, cruising the highways of Leonida in cars with the radio up — which is, when you think about it, exactly where a Tom Petty song about a motorcycle-hearted love affair always belonged. There is a deep, satisfying symmetry to it. Petty spent his career writing about roads — running down dreams, refusing to back down, learning to fly — and about the people who stay on them past the point of reason. Love Is a Long Road is the purest of those songs, and its own road turned out to be the longest of all: garage studio to B-side to radio sleeper to, thirty-four years on, the anthem of the most anticipated game on Earth. The losers get lucky sometimes. So, occasionally, do the B-sides.