9/6/24 Dispatch: On Tom Petty's 'Magnolia'

Welcome to my Petty Party.

I’ve always been drawn to songs that contain a narrative, particularly a narrative about sex. I’m thinking of the Rod Stewart classic Maggie May (hell, the album the song comes from is titled ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’); the Amanda Shires ballad Parking Lot Pirouette; most of the oeuvres of Lucinda Williams and Leonard Cohen. Even the original name of this blog, Black Jack David, is a reference to the eponymous folk song — a traditional Scottish scorcher about a privileged woman who gives it all up for the chance to bed our ragtag (anti)hero. Which is to say: within me lies an insatiable penchant for tales of one night specials wrung through the skein of song. 

Why song and not prose? Blame my questing hybrid heart: I like genre crossover; I like hidden chambers (many of ‘em bloody, thanks to an early childhood immersion in fairytales); I like when one thing lets slip — or joins forces with a second to find — another. By which I mean: some poems only reveal themselves as such through music. By which I consequently mean: when it’s sung, you can’t always tell where the line breaks are.

Today, I want to take a look at a song that stunned me the first time I heard it: Magnolia by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

What compels me about this song is simple: the title. Does magnolia refer to the flower, or is it the name of Petty’s bygone lover? Or is magnolia not some pedestrian noun or moniker — the literal scent on the air; the literal scrawl on the birth certificate — but rather a metaphor, a kind of synecdoche for the lovers’ time together writ large? 

To wit:   

Yeah, that’s when she kissed me and told me her name / I never did tell her mine / Magnolia

I remember the smell of the wind through the sweet (suite?) / Magnolia

In the first line, it seems clear that Magnolia is the name the woman has given Tom. (Of course, it could also be the narrator’s name — but given that subsequent lyrics refer solely to the female lover, I’m operating under the assumption that if it’s anyone’s name, it’s hers.)

But in the second line, things get a touch ambiguous. ‘I remember the smell of the wind through the sweet magnolia.’ Straightforward enough. But if they’re in a suite (and of course, when listening to a song, you’ve no idea how the lyrics are spelled), then there’s a line break after the image of the wind, and magnolia comes in (as if on the wind) as a reminiscence all its own. Sure, it could be the subject after a colon; i.e., ‘I remember the smell of the wind through the suite: magnolia[-scented].’ But why pause in the song if that’s the case? Instead, Petty drags the lyric out, places magnolia on an un-enjambed line of its own. Magnolia solo, then, is an image unto itself, or more accurately, because we’re in the realm of ‘I remember,’ a memory: A memory of a woman, a memory of a smell, a memory of a time and place and coital act: frenzy.

The next mention of ‘magnolia’ comes a little later:

And I know that she’s out there somewhere in the world / She’s forgotten me but I remember her / Magnolia

Is it the woman Petty remembers? ‘I remember her, Magnolia.’ Or is it something belonging to her — either some ineffable essence or something she carried/bore on her person, a branch or petal perhaps, or, likelier still, her very sex organ, a magnolia having, like all flowers, a vaginal pistil? ‘I remember her magnolia [and it was sexy].’ Or, as posited above, is magnolia simply a summation of the events of the evening’s love — a shorthand for the lover left like a sweet-smelling wind? A cap on the couplet, so to speak; a Kane-ian refrain. Magnolia, magnolia… Each time Petty sings the word, a troupe of background singers echo it, twisting the syllables slightly, so that the disorientation becomes a feature, not a bug.

The genius of the song — the reason it stuns me even now, after many additional listens — is that the answer is, inexorably, all of the above. Such is a love affair: sensations twine and merge and cross one another out, a la the famed Nikki Giovanni poem ‘I Wrote a Good Omelet.’ I won’t pretend I know what Petty’s doing musically to highlight the synesthesia of it all (I’ve no training in sonic composition), but I do know that I’m drawn to the way in which a sung verse can allow for greater possibilities than a static, written — ergo fixed — one. 

She’s forgotten me but I remember her / Magnolia

I think, here, of the Odyssey’s Nausicaa: Never forget me. To remember is to give life. Magnolia blooms for us; we need no pleasure suite to make it so.