“Even The Losers” by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

"Even the Losers" sits third on Damn the Torpedoes, the 1979 album that was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' third, and it grew out of one night back in Petty's hometown of Gainesville, Florida, when he was young. He spent it with friends and a girl who had been his junior-high crush and who, unlike back in school, actually liked him that night; the next morning she told him it had been a one-time thing. That same night it dawned on him that he needed to play in a rock and roll band, and years later it was still on his mind when he wrote the song.

In the studio, Mike Campbell struggled to come up with a solo. It never came out as a single outside Australia, but it has become one of the most admired songs in Petty's catalog.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.