You Got Lucky
1982 single by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
"You Got Lucky" is the first single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' album Long After Dark. The song peaked at #20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart, where it stayed for three weeks at the end of 1982. Unusually for a Petty song, synthesizers carry the song's main structure.
Composition
In a November 2003 interview with Songfacts, guitarist Mike Campbell explained the song's origins:
"You Got Lucky" was written to a drum loop. I had made a drum loop in my studio and put the music together. We went into the studio and actually recreated another drum loop. The drummer would actually go out and play, then we'd cut the tape and tape the loop together. We ran it around the room over some mic stands and through the tape heads, and then printed that for three or four minutes and then recorded the song over that drum loop. The guitar solo was Tom's idea, he suggested we do an Ennio Morricone guitar sound, kind of a vibrato arm strat kind of solo. Sort of a surf guitar with a tremolo arm, like a Clint Eastwood movie, a Good, The Bad And The Ugly kind of thing.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “You Got Lucky” is 1982 single by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lucky, single and Petty, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1982 single by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8057242. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “You Got Lucky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.