Refugee

Tom Petty made “Refugee” while he was being sued by his record label and looking at bankruptcy. That’s the fact to hold onto. The most confident-sounding song the man ever cut came out of the year he had the least to be confident about.

Damn the Torpedoes was recorded in legal limbo. Months of it — his career in jeopardy, his band’s future uncertain, the threat of bankruptcy sitting on the table the whole time he was making the record. None of that is in the sound. The record is one of the most confident-sounding things in rock, and it was built by a man who could have lost everything by the end of the week.

“Refugee” is the center of it. Mike Campbell’s riff arrives and you know it in two notes, precise to the edge of militaristic. The rhythm section locks in like a march. And over it Petty sings about someone trapped in a bad situation, someone who has forgotten they can walk away.

You don’t have to live like a refugee. He sings the line again and again, the way you repeat something you’re trying to make true. Maybe for somebody else. Maybe for himself, in the middle of his own bad year. The words sound simple. What he’s actually saying is that you have a choice.

Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some. He isn’t judging the person in the song. He’s diagnosing them. He’s describing how people end up settling for less than they’re owed — how circumstances grind a person down until they forget what they were fighting for. He knew the shape of that. He was inside one while he wrote it.

What carries the song is what he leaves out. He never tells the refugee what to do instead. He never names the exit. He just keeps insisting that this — whatever this is — isn’t the only way it has to go. Sometimes that’s the whole job. Sometimes hearing one person say you don’t have to live this way is the first thing that makes you believe it.

Petty wrote for underdogs his whole career. He made this one in the middle of being one. He didn’t have an answer for the person in the song and he didn’t pretend to. He just refused to agree that the situation was permanent, and he made that refusal sound like the most certain thing in the world.

You don’t have to live like a refugee. He sang it like he’d already decided, with a lawsuit on the table and the bank account he didn’t have, and you believe him.