The life of a traveling musician has long carried a romantic reputation—packed arenas, roaring crowds, endless adventure, and the thrill of life on the road. For superstar artists with luxurious tour buses and devoted entourages, that image can sometimes be true. But behind the glamour lies a far less glamorous reality: endless highways, sleepless nights, stale gas station coffee, and long stretches of downtime between the moments that actually matter.
Even legends of rock ‘n’ roll understood that contradiction.
One of them was Janis Joplin, whose raw honesty about life as a performer would eventually inspire one of the most beloved songs in Tom Petty’s catalog.
The Thought That Sparked “The Waiting”
In Paul Zollo’s Conversations With Tom Petty, Petty recalled hearing an interview with Joplin sometime in the late 1960s. Although he couldn’t remember the exact interview, he vividly remembered the feeling behind her words.
According to Petty, Joplin had been talking about how much she loved performing live. The moments on stage—the energy, the connection, the rush—were everything to her. All the time spent traveling, waiting around, and killing hours before the next show felt insignificant by comparison.
Petty remembered her sentiment as something close to:
“Everything else is just waiting.”
That idea stayed with him for years and eventually evolved into the unforgettable chorus line:
“The waiting is the hardest part.”
The lyric would become the emotional centerpiece of “The Waiting,” the lead single from Petty’s 1981 album Hard Promises.
Interestingly, Roger McGuinn later claimed that he was actually the one who said the phrase to Petty. Petty himself laughed off the confusion, admitting that maybe McGuinn did say it at some point—but in his mind, the inspiration always traced back to Joplin’s reflections on life as a performer.
A Song About Waiting… That Took Forever to Write
Ironically, “The Waiting” lived up to its own title during the songwriting process.
Petty admitted the song took weeks to complete because he started with only the chorus. While he knew he had something special, building the rest of the song around that powerful hook proved difficult.
“It took a very long time to write the song,” Petty explained. “I had a really good chorus, and I had to work backwards from the chorus.”
Still, he never gave up on it.
“I just had to get the whole fish in the boat,” he said. “I knew I hooked it.”
That persistence paid off.
The Song Became One of Tom Petty’s Biggest Hits
Released in 1981, “The Waiting” quickly became one of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ signature songs. It topped Billboard’s Top Tracks chart, climbed to No. 19 on the Hot 100, and reached No. 6 in Canada.
More importantly, the song resonated because its message was universal.
Waiting is part of nearly every human experience—waiting for love, success, answers, opportunities, or simply the next big moment in life. Petty managed to turn that frustration into an anthem that still feels relatable decades later.
And fittingly, the song itself proved its own point: sometimes the hardest part really is the waiting.