Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — Letting You Go

JUL 01 1981 · 12:00

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — Letting You Go (1981) Director: Jim Lenahan Era: MTV Launch Era (1981) - Coinciding with the birth of MTV, this video arrives during the embryonic phase of the music video as a mass art form, when artists were still negotiating the conventions of the format itself. High curatorial value as an artifact of MTV's founding year that actively interrogates the medium it inhabits. The video's self-referential conceit and Lenahan's background as a live-lighting designer give it a documentary rawness rare in the era. Featured in the 1989 MTV Rockumentary: Tom Petty II, it has documented archival afterlife within the network's own cultural history programming, affirming its significance as a period document. Context: Released in 1981 — the same year MTV launched — 'Letting You Go' arrives at the precise moment when the music video was being defined as a medium. Rather than embracing the new format uncritically, Tom Petty and director Jim Lenahan produced a self-aware, postmodern clip that interrogates the artifice of the form itself. The video's conceit — cameras encroaching on the band, forcing a reaction — reflects Petty's well-documented discomfort with lip-synching and performance-for-camera, transforming that anxiety into the video's central concept. As a non-single album track from Hard Promises, it represents an early instance of video production as artistic statement rather than promotional necessity, situating the band as reluctant but thoughtful participants in the MTV era. Director notes: Confirmed director per IMDb (tt27234140) with an IMDb release date of October 10, 1981. The video is drawn from the Hard Promises album (May 5, 1981) and was not released as a radio single. Rolling Stone has characterized it as 'shockingly postmodern,' describing it as a video about making a video, in which the band reacts to cameramen encroaching on their personal space. Lenahan came to video direction from his role as the Heartbreakers' longtime lighting designer, bringing a lighting-centric visual sensibility to the work. His early Petty videos were shot in collaboration with cinematographer Daniel Pearl. The video was later featured in the 1989 MTV Rockumentary: Tom Petty II.