1981 Classic Written by Rock Legend Was Overshadowed by His Duet With Another Music Icon
In 1981, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released a song that should have been a top hit.
"A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)" was the second single from the band's Hard Promises album. Written by Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell, the song opened with a sweeping synthesizer and featured emotional, reflective verses and an explosive chorus about an ex who had moved on.
Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench described the song as "brilliant" and "beautiful."
"I like the way the track breathes," he told Songfacts in an interview. "There is a lot of space, there are a lot of places where there's only drums, bass and one guitar playing with a vocal. I like the air in that song. I like the way that the beat picks up a little and then drops down in tempo and picks up for the chorus and then drops back down for the verses."
"I'm a huge fan of Tom's writing and Mike's writing," he added. "So it's a delight to be in the Heartbreakers because we just sit there and these beautiful, beautiful songs show up and you get to get your hands on them."
In July 1981, Billboarddescribed "A Woman In Love" as the "most dramatic" song on the Hard Promises album, while Goldmine ranked it as one of five Petty songs that deserved to be on a greatest hits album.
But "A Woman in Love" was not a massive hit. It peaked at No. 79 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 1981, overshadowed by another song Petty wrote and performed on, but gave to Stevie Nicks.
Around the same time that "A Woman in Love" was released, Stevie Nicks released the song "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." The first single from the Fleetwood Mac songstress's debut solo album, Bella Donna, was written by Petty and Campbell and given to Nicks after she repeatedly asked them for a song. Petty re-recorded the song as a duet with Nicks, and she released it in July 1981, just over a week after Petty's "A Woman in Love" was released.
In essence, Petty ended up competing against his own song for chart placement-and "Stop Draggin' My Heart around" won. The song went to No. 3 and became the biggest hit of all time for both Petty and Nicks as a solo artist.
While he was part of a massive hit, Petty wasn't completely happy at the time. In the book Conversations With Tom Petty, he admitted he wished the two songs had been released farther apart.
"They came out roughly the same time, and Stevie's record was huge," he recalled. "And so it was an awkward position for us because it was billed as 'Stevie Nicks With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,' and a lot of the radio programmers didn't want to have two Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers songs around the same period. Especially while one was getting this extreme amount of airplay. So it was a little awkward for us."
Petty also said that producer Jimmy Iovine, who was dating Nicks at the time, tried to calm him down.
"His comeback was like: 'This is gonna buy you a house,'" the rock legend said per Rhino. "But it pissed me off because it came out at the same time as our single ["A Woman in Love"], and I think ours suffered."
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This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 6:04 AM.