Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — A Woman In Love (It's Not Me)

JUL 01 1981 · 12:00

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — A Woman In Love (It's Not Me) (1981) Director: Jim Lenahan Era: MTV Launch Era / Early Music Video (1981) - Pre-MTV broadcast, among the first generation of American rock promotional clips made as short films rather than live performance documents; released as second single from Hard Promises (Backstreet/MCA, May 1981) Exceptionally high. This is Jim Lenahan's directorial debut and the founding video of a visually coherent Tom Petty music video canon. Its verifiable downstream influence on The Police's "Every Breath You Take" — through shared cinematographer Daniel Pearl — makes it a rare documented case of direct aesthetic transmission between two canonical early-MTV-era videos. Its zero-saturation, high-contrast film-noir grammar is analytically legible and historically significant, placing it in the top tier of early 1980s rock music video artifacts. Context: Released June 1981 as the second single from Hard Promises — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' fourth studio album — this video arrived at the precise cusp of music video's institutionalization: MTV launched August 1, 1981, just weeks after the single's release. The clip thus occupies a liminal position as a late promotional film and an early MTV-era artifact simultaneously. The production emerged from a deeply personal creative ecosystem: director Lenahan had known Petty since the early 1970s in Gainesville, Florida, and had been the band's lighting designer from the Heartbreakers' inception, making his directorial instincts organically matched to the band's visual identity. The song itself, co-written by Petty and Mike Campbell, addresses romantic dissolution with understated emotional authority — a theme rendered visually through darkness, shadow, and the isolating geometry of film noir. Director notes: "A Woman In Love (It's Not Me)" was Jim Lenahan's first music video as director. Lenahan has stated the film-noir visual approach arose directly from his instincts as a lighting designer — the chiaroscuro black-and-white look mapped onto the song's dynamic structure, with dark quiet verses and bright loud choruses. Cinematographer was Daniel Pearl (DP on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), who shot the majority of the five Petty videos Lenahan directed. Film producer was Robert Lombard; Tom Petty and Mike Campbell served as producers. Pearl later applied a similar lighting design and cinematography to The Police's "Every Breath You Take" (1983 MTV VMA winner for Best Cinematography), shot at the same location. The "A Woman In Love" video is shown playing on a TV set within the later Petty video "You Got Lucky" (1982), cementing its canonical status within the band's own video mythology.