Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – You Got Lucky

From their 1982 album Long After Dark, the song peaked at #20 on Billboards Hot 100 chart and #1 on Billboards Top Tracks chart where it stayed for 3 weeks in 1982.

From songfacts.

In this song, Tom Petty does some posturing, telling a girl that she got lucky when he found her, and warning her that she can do no better. All that posturing is wrapped in a chorus with a simple message: “Good love is hard to find.”

The song does not appear to based on Petty’s real life; he had been married since 1976.
Musically, this is one of the more distinctive Tom Petty songs, which helped it endure as a Classic Rock favorite. In a Songfacts interview with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, he said: “‘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 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 3 or 4 minutes and then recorded the song over that drum loop.”

Petty added the lyrics and came up with the idea for the guitar solo. He suggested they do sort of a surf guitar with a tremolo arm, like in the Clint Eastwood movie The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were one of the few established American rock bands to embrace the concept of music videos, and MTV loved them for it. The “You Got Lucky” video was pioneering because the song didn’t start until over a minute into the clip. Inspired by the Mad Max films, we see a desolate, futuristic landscape where Petty discovers and old boom box which plays the song. The band wrote the treatment themselves, and Jim Lenahan directed.

You Got Luck

One, two
You better watch what you say
You better watch what you do to me
Don’t get carried away
Girl, if you can do better than me, go
Yeah, go but remember

Good love is hard to find
Good love is hard to find
You got lucky, babe
You got lucky, babe, when I found you

You put a hand on my cheek
And then you turned your eyes away
If you don’t feel complete
If I don’t take you all of the way then go
Yeah, go but remember

Good love is hard to find
Good love is hard to find
You got lucky, babe
You got lucky, babe, when I found you

Yeah, go just go, but remember

Good love is hard to find
Good love is hard to find
You got lucky, babe
You got lucky, babe, when I found youWriter/s: MICHAEL W. CAMPBELL, TOM PETTY