Music / ↳ You Took My Breath Away

You Took My Breath Away

Written by: The full band Lead vocals: Tom Petty, with Bob Dylan Length: 3:18 to 3:19 Album: Vol. 3, track 10

The penultimate track on Vol. 3 is also its most quietly emotional, a tender acoustic ballad that many listeners and more than a few critics have come to read as an unspoken tribute to Roy Orbison, even though he's never mentioned by name anywhere in the lyric. Petty sings about a song being taken and permanently changed, its middle section altered so completely that the words no longer fit the way they used to, language that lands very differently once you know this is the first Wilburys album made without the man whose voice had defined so much of the first one.

Nobody involved has ever confirmed the reading outright, and it's entirely possible the lyric began as a more conventional breakup song before circumstance gave it a second meaning nobody originally intended. But the timing, the first Wilburys record without Orbison, a song specifically about loss and irreversible change, sitting two tracks before the album's closer, makes the tribute reading difficult to entirely dismiss.

Whatever the songwriters intended, Jeff Lynne's production gives the track real depth, and Petty's vocal, gentle and a little worn, carries exactly the weight the song needs. It's the closest Vol. 3 comes to directly processing the loss that shaped its entire creation.

Previous track: New Blue Moon. Next track: Wilbury Twist. Or see the full Vol. 3 tracklist.