On This Day: Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers' "Hard Promises" is released
After a contractual battle and battle over price point, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers delivered "Hard Promises" on May 5, 1981.
If an album title can ever reflect a band’s broader circumstance at the time, the fourth studio album from Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Hard Promises, fit that bill.
The follow-up to the wildly successful Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises found the group mired in a contract dispute as the band’s record label was sold to MCA. MCA wanted to experiment with “superstar pricing”, a dollar more than the typical list price on the follow up to Damn The Torpedoes, which Petty was against. He threatened to withhold the record, or title it Eight Ninety Eight.
A lot of fans have been with us for a long time and I think they trust us," Petty told The New York Times regarding the subsequent standoff. "MCA has done a great job selling our records, but they couldn't see the reality of what it's like on the street — they couldn't see that raising the album's price wouldn't be fair.
Hard Promises, which would yielded a top-20 single in “The Waiting”, was released on May 5, 1981. A second single, “A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)” peaked at No. 79 on the Billboard Hot 100. Stevie Nicks did a guest vocal on a duet for the song “Insider” with Petty, setting the stage for a collaboration on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”