Into the Great Wide Open

Under Them Skies of Blue 🌤️

Possibility, Starting Over, and What It Means to Have the Future Wide Open

Tom Petty had a gift for making big feelings feel like a wide open highway. Not the kind of wide open that is empty and frightening, but the kind that has the windows down and the radio up and something worth moving toward on the other end. “Into the Great Wide Open” might be the best example of that gift he ever put on tape. It is a three-minute story about a kid named Eddie Rebel who heads west with a guitar and a dream and the whole future in front of him.

I have loved Tom Petty since I was young. He was one of those artists who sounded like he was telling the truth even when he was telling a story about someone else entirely. You believed Eddie. You believed the girl named Jade. You believed the clubs, the rehearsal spaces, the LA that still felt like possibility rather than machinery. Petty made you believe because he clearly believed it himself, right up until the moment the story ends and you realize the wide open was the whole point, not what came after.

My son Dylan just graduated college. He is 22, and the world is genuinely wide open in front of him. I have been thinking about what that means for him and, if I'm honest, what it means to me to watch it happen from where I'm standing. There is a photo of him from a river trip that I took when he did not know I was looking. He was staring out at the water with everything ahead of him and his whole face open to it. I was behind the camera falling apart. That picture has stayed with me.

This song is part of why.

The line that gets me every time is the simplest one: “The future was wide open.” Petty sings it like a fact, past tense, looking back at the moment before everything complicated itself. There is a particular kind of grief in that tense. Not the grief of something lost, exactly. More the grief of a door that only opens one way.

Depression does not announce itself as the thing that closes that door. It just starts making the future feel smaller. Gradually the wide open becomes something you look at from a distance rather than something you move through. The window is still there. You can still see the highway. 

Getting back out onto it is a different project entirely, and it is not always clear which direction to go or whether you still have the coordinates for that version of yourself who believed the world was worth the trouble of driving toward.

Eddie teaches himself guitar in the song. That landed for me in a specific way, because I play guitar myself. Mediocre is the honest word for it, and my family will confirm this without being asked. The point was never to be good. The point was always that picking up the guitar and working at something you love, badly, is an act of believing the future is still worth learning things in. Eddie did that. I do that. It is a small and genuine thing.

The song is tagged as a story about someone else, but Petty was writing about something he understood from the inside. He left Gainesville, Florida at nineteen with a band and an unreasonable amount of confidence and headed toward whatever was going to happen. The wide open was real for him before it became a song about it. That is the only way you write a song like this, from having actually stood on the edge of something and jumped.

What I Want Dylan to Know 💫

Watching Dylan graduate is one of the better things I have gotten to do. He has his mother's instincts and more clarity about who he is than I had at twice his age. The world is going to be complicated for him in ways I cannot predict, and some of those complications will come from inside rather than outside, because that is how it works in this family and probably in most families. What I hope he carries with him is that the wide open is not something that disappears when things get hard.

Recovery from anything, whether it is a bad year or a bad decade or a version of yourself you are trying to leave behind, has a quality of wide open to it when you can feel it. There are mornings in my own life that still have that feeling. The dog is on the couch, the coffee is right, and the day has not filled in yet. That is the great wide open at its most practical. It does not require a guitar and a road trip and a girl named Jade. It just requires the next day to still be there.

Tom Petty died in 2017 and the world has been quieter for it in a specific way. He was one of those artists who made you feel like someone was out there getting it right, swimming against the stream, making the true thing. “Into the Great Wide Open” is the version of his work I keep coming back to lately, not because of the nostalgia, but because of the tense. Past tense for Eddie, present tense for everyone who is still on the road.

The future is wide open. That is still true. The direction is yours.

Take gentle care of yourselves and of each other.

Keep going,

Blake

Disclaimer: While music can be a powerful tool for emotional well-being, it is not a substitute for professional mental health support. The information in this blog is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or professional advice. I am not a trained mental health expert. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified therapist or counselor. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. You can also contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.