Tom Petty’s She’s the One is an unfairly marginalized album in his discography. The chips were stacked against it: For starters, it followed Wildflowers, which many fans (myself included) feel is Petty’s best album. For another, it was framed as a soundtrack for a forgettable Ed Burns film of the same name. Not as consistent as Wildflowers, She’s the One nevertheless has some of his best songs from a fertile period. Jeff Balke, bassist in the local band Orange Is In, chose its opening track, Walls (Circus), for a conversation topic.

This is Tom Petty:

Tom Petty Superstar . . . Do you think you're what they say you are?

This is Jeff Balke:

Orange Is In: We've left a clue as to which one is Balke

29-95: Ready go go?
Balke: Yeah man, I'm a musician, so for my entire life I've been sitting around dissecting songs.

29-95: And I'm not a musician. So my reactions are purely visceral, emotional and occasionally full of gobbledygook.
Balke: Well, I get that too. There are parts that are purely mental. But there are other visceral responses and things that hit me personally. That line he sings, "all around your island is a barricade," it's one of those lines that resonates with me. I've known a lot of people in my life who are closed off that way. He's able to say it, very typical Tom Petty, very succinctly.

29-95: I’m intrigued as to why you picked this one. It’s a favorite of mine, but the album was kind of the beginning of a sort of sales attrition for Petty.
Balke: I didn’t hear it originally on the album. I was at this event, a CD swap where everybody puts a CD in a box and pulls one out. And I got one labeled “My Favorite Tom Petty Songs.” It struck me immediately because it has those quintessential Petty elements. And it also felt like one of those where he was wearing his influences on his sleeves. The song structure, five chords, sounds very 1950s. The chord progressions are like Earth Angel or something. It still has the Byrds influence with the 12-string guitar. And it’s Beatles-ish where it starts with the straight piano and ends with that breakdown. I liked the combination of those things together.

29-95: Simplicity seems crucial to the best of his songs.
Balke Yeah, it’s a very simple song melodically. Even the guitar solo is just repeating the melody with a 12-string. That really appealed to me.

29-95: Speaking more about his lyrics than sound, the simple rhymes remind me a lot of Hank Williams. Though there are always sneaky moments of complexity. But he's not big on three-syllable words.
Balke: He knows about brevity. He can turn a phrase, but he tends to be more direct. There’s some cryptic stuff on this one — the bit about “half of me is ocean, half of me is sky” — but the bit “all around your island is a barricade,” it’s pretty direct. Those are advanced lyrical techniques for a guy who is perceived as being so straightforward.

29-95: I like that it starts so bluntly: “Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks.” Why yes they are ...
Balke: Yeah, who knows what he was thinking when he wrote it, but I get the feeling he wrote the next line first: “Some doors are open some roads are blocked.” Songwriters often have little things they return to. Petty always seems to be comparing these things to nature, hair blowing in the wind, or diamonds and rocks. The good writers are extremely good at that without seeming repetitious.

Yeah, I've always wanted to ask him about the "I was walking with her in town her hair was in the wind line" from A Higher Place because it flips the wind in her hair cliche. I'm curious as to whether he's so enamored with this person that he saw something differently. Or if he just needed a line to rhyme with the next one, which is "I gave her my best kiss, she gave it back again."
Balke: (Laughs.) Yeah, without getting a chance to ask him we may never know . . . Is that Lindsey Buckingham singing on the chorus?

29-95: Indeed it is.
Balke: I love the sound on the chorus.

29-95: It's strange because it sounds like a Jeff Lynne-produced chorus to me. It's very on/off and crisp.
Balke: Jeff Lynne produced this?

29-95: No, Rick Rubin.
Balke: This is Rick Rubin? Interesting. The one thing I can tell here that's different than Lynne is that most of the time Lynne does vocals that tend to not have this overlapping thing going on. They tend to be spot-on and direct. The thing about this, it's a very California 1960s sounding vocal. The thing you'd hear from Crosby Stills and Nash or the Byrds. It's a very distinctive sound. Much in the same way there are things I associate with California and New York in terms of songwriting and production. California you hear things like sleigh bells, and in the same way you distinctly hear different people singing.

29-95: You seemed to enjoy the bits when he shouts out mid-song.
Balke: I love that it’s such a clean song. No drum fills, no cymbal crashes. Petty’s the only person allowed to step out. He’s the only rogue element among that stuff. It makes me wonder if it’s just him riffing on himself. Or something he thought out in my advance, which I doubt. In my experience in the studio, you find these happy accidents that sound really good. But you can’t repeat them. That “oooh” or the “yes they do.” You can’t run through it a second time and be like, “Hey, can you yell ‘oooh’ again like you did the last time?”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
With ZZ Top
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday
Where: Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, 2005 Lake Robbins, The Woodlands
Tickets: $43.50-$133.50; 800-745-3000 or www.ticketmaster.com

Orange Is In
When: 8:45 p.m. Oct. 29
Where: Bohemeo's, 708 Telephone
Tickets: $5 at the door