On June 3, 1985,Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released an uptempo soul-infused track called “Make It Better (Forget About Me)” along with a lighthearted video that reinforced the band’s off-kilter character. The problem was, Petty hated it.
The song was co-written with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and while it's not bad, it helped pull the Heartbreakers’ sixth album,Southern Accents, off course. The follow-up to 1982’s was supposed to have been a concept piece about the American South however, “Make It Better” had absolutely nothing to do with the theme, and its presence on the LP meant another, better-suited track had to be removed.
“I hate that song, it’s just trash,” Petty told Paul Zollo in the 2020 book Conversations With Tom Petty. “It was Dave just trying to get me to knock a song out. Just write a song for the sake of writing one. And I think that’s what it sounds like to me. It’s one of the few that I just don’t like. I like a lot of our work. I’m pretty proud of most of it. That one was the result of some misguided people. We didn’t really know what we were doing.”