Tom Petty Runnin Down A Dream

[Gundenia Ransbottom]

Runnin' Down a Dream" is a song co-written and recorded by Tom Petty. It was released in July 1989 as the second single from his first solo album Full Moon Fever. "Runnin' Down a Dream" achieved reasonable chart success, reaching number 23 both in Canada and on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the top of the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.[3] It has since garnered significant airplay on classic rock stations, and lent its name to the 2007 documentary on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

The song was co-written by Mike Campbell, along with Petty and Jeff Lynne. It was a nod to Petty's musical roots, with the lyric "me and Del were singin' 'Little Runaway'" making reference to Del Shannon and "Runaway".

The music video for "Runnin' Down a Dream", directed by Jim Lenahan and animated by Pittsburgh-based companies Allan & Wilson Animation Studio and Anivision Ltd., featured animation, based on several episodes of the classic comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay, featuring a drawing style reminiscent of McCay's and showing Petty and a character who resembles Flip travelling through Slumberland. The 1933 film King Kong is also briefly referenced when Petty, atop the Chrysler Building, attempts to swat at attacking oversized mosquitoes, much like Kong swatting at the biplanes in the film.

It was the official theme song of the 2006 NBA Finals as well as the 2008 NBA Finals. The song was also used by ABC in the 2010 NBA Finals when the presentation of the game reached the end of the third quarter and was phased out into a commercial break. The song is featured in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the in-game classic rock station K-DST.[6] The song is playable in Guitar Hero 5 and was released as downloadable content for Rock Band 2; in Guitar Hero 5 the master track is used.[7]

It closed Petty and the Heartbreakers' performance at the February 2008 Super Bowl XLII Halftime Show,[8] encoda'ed with a long Mike Campbell guitar solo.[8] The next morning, following the Patriots loss to the Giants, which ended their chance at perfection, the song was used during Super Bowl highlights on ESPN. It was also used in promotional segments of the 2008 MLB World Series.

In 2011, the song was included in Tom Hanks's film Larry Crowne and on its soundtrack.[9] In the animated television series King of the Hill episode "Arlen City Bomber", Lucky Kleinschmidt (voiced by Tom Petty) says "I'm gonna help you run down that dream, Bobby" of getting Bobby a freshly made corn chip off the production line. The song was used in the Family Guy episode "The Book of Joe" when Brian achieves his "runner's high".

In 2017 after Petty's death, NBC used the song for the promo for its telecast of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. NBC began using a version of this song as their theme for NASCAR on NBC in the summer of 2018, replacing "Bringing Back the Sunshine" by Blake Shelton. This song is covered by ZZ Ward.[10] The song was also featured on the opening montage of ON Video Skateboarding Issue #1 Summer 2000.

Verse 1:

[E] It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down I had the

[D] radio on, I was drivin'

Riff 1

[E] The trees went back, me and Del were singin' Little

[D] Runaway, I was so

[E] blind

Chorus:

Yeah, [D] Runnin' [G] down a [E] dream

[E] Never would [G] come to [A] me

[D] Workin' [G] on a [E] mystery

[E] Goin' [G] wherever it [A] leads

[D] Runnin' [G] down a [E] dream

Verse 2:

[E] I felt so good, like anything was possible Hit

[D] cruise control, and rub my eyes

Riff 1

E Last three days, the rain was unstoppable It was

[D] always cold, no

[E] sunshine

Verse3:

[E] I rolled on, the sky grew dark I put the

[D] pedal down, to make some time

Riff 1

[E] There's something good, waiting down this road I'm pickin'

[D] up, whatever is

[E] mine

The Verses are just full down strokes when you see the chord. Take your time. On some of the longer sentences I will add a couple of light quick upward strokes, (just catch the bottom two strings), like where the commas are. This seams to fill it in more, and helps keeps the rhythm of the song going.

You don't have to play the riff in the middle, but when I do I let the last note ring, and skip the E chord in the next line (but I keep in the up stokes).

When you play the Chorus it's a down stroke on the first two chords and then down and up 4 times real quick on the third chord. If this is to hard, you can do a down-up down down.

This is played much faster than the Verses.

I am at a total lost on how to play the Solo, maybe someone can tell us witch scale to use, or give us something simple to play.

I have a pedal that controls the volume, and I play the Riff and slowly back off on it.

This is my first time making an EZ song from scratch so bear with me on this one.

Let me know if this sounds close enough to post, and if you have any suggestions I would love to hear them. Also you need more of an explanation on any part just ask.

Petty caught his first whiff of rock 'n' roll at the age of eleven, when Elvis rolled into his hometown of Gainesville, Florida to shoot a scene for his 1961 film Follow That Dream. Petty's uncle worked on the movie and snuck his awed nephew onto the girl-swarmed set to shake hands with the King himself. He would later recall in the book Conversations with Tom Petty: "It was nothing like I'd ever seen in my life. At fifty yards, we were stunned by what this guy looked like ... his hair was so black, I remember that it shined blue when the sunlight hit it ... I thought at that time, 'That is one hell of a job to have. That's a great gig--Elvis Presley.' " While it would be Beatles '45s that turned Petty onto the guitar, and Bob Dylan who opened his mind to the possibilities of songwriting, it is telling that his first brush with the dream of rock 'n' roll (in Follow that Dream, no less) came from a vision of Elvis, his blue-black hair, and train of white Cadillacs. Petty's music, in its unambitious simplicity and bare hopes for the freedoms of the open road and sky, has always hearkened back to the music of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley--rock 'n' roll before it was burdened by the cultural weight of the sixties.

Take his first breakout single in the UK, "Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll" (1976), with its insouciant strain: "Anything that's rock 'n' roll's fine." Or the infectious "Zombie Zoo" (1989), which closes his breakthrough Full Moon Fever, in which the potentially transgressive subject of cross-dressing is given the most innocuous treatment imaginable. Petty's own take on the song: "It's a very light-hearted song. Nonsense, really. There's no great statement. It was just for the fun of it." It is revealing how often Petty uses these terms to describe his own music. He calls "Into the Great Wide Open" (1991) his morality play about selling out, "light-hearted." Or the way he describes being lumped in erroneously with punk or New Wave acts: "In truth we were just a rock 'n' roll band. But that was far too simple for people."

It is its very simplicity, after all, that makes rock 'n' roll music what it is. In The Closing of the American Mind, the brilliant conservative Alan Bloom correctly identified the genre as a music of adolescence. The great lie of rock 'n' roll is that the complete range of human emotion is contained in the adolescent experience. It is a freeing lie, no doubt, and one that America, in almost every sense an adolescent country, has embraced with a characteristic mixture of denial and glee. In this sense, a rock star is a person gifted with a surplus of adolescence, a grown man or woman who can continue to delve into a teenager's disappointments and exhilarations long into his thirties, forties (and in Mick Jagger's case), eleventies.

Of course, this is not to say Petty is incapable of turning a phrase. My favorite song of his, "American Girl," boasts not only a propulsive, antsy guitar part (later ripped off wholesale by the Strokes for their career-launching single, "Last Nite") but some truly incisive lyricism: "She was an American Girl/raised on promises," a pretty good summation of an admirable American hopefulness and not-so-admirable American entitlement. It's also descriptive of Petty's own body of work: He has been nothing if not a promise-maker. You will feel free, he keeps telling the kids, you will run down your dream.

What better forum for Petty, then, than the Super Bowl, that pageantry of promises? While advertisers pay millions to guarantee us happiness through lasting erections and fuel-efficient trucks, and football players get paid millions to promise us the glories of bone-crushing athleticism, Petty and his Heartbreakers will take the stage to dust off some old promises--to rock to the east, rock to the west--those of good ole dumb fun--that he himself was raised on.

It's about the different stages of a journey through life in the context of a road trip. The first verse is happy, it's nice outside and they are singing along to the radio. The second verse is a little darker. It is raining, and he has to rub his eyes to keep his concentration. In the third verse, he puts the pedal down to speed up and can see the goal ahead. The entire song he is pushing toward the dream or destination of a road trip.

Tom made the reference to Del Shannon just as a quick one-off name check for his friend, who was a kind of old-time 50s crooner type who had written the #1 hit "Little Runaway" back in 1961 and was hanging around the studio a lot when Tom was recording Full Moon Fever in 1988. They got along really good, I think Tom admired him since he was much older than him and was kind of a fish out of water in the new music world.

Im def. with EATaPEACH on the reference to the life journey, but along with many other petty songs, i think there are also some references to grass. I think this song follows the process of smokin verse by verse. In the first verse, the sun beating down could be a reference to pot, like sunshine. and he also says i was flying, or high. Second verse, he talks about some side effects like rubbing his eyes, and he says its always cold, like when your body temp. decreases when smoking pot. Im really not sure about this, but sometimes pot can be reffered to as a rainy day woman, which may tie into him saying the rain was unstoppable. In the third verse he says the sky grew dark which =no sunshine, so the pots wore off some. And maybe the last couple of lines could be him going to get his fix

3a8082e126