1993 Rock Classic Is Suddenly Climbing the Charts 33 Years Later
Hundreds of thousands of teens are putting on their prom dresses to a song older than they are.
While Tom Petty may have written "Mary Jane's Last Dance" to get out of a record deal, three decades later, it's back on the charts because of an unlikely source - TikTok.
During prom season, which typically runs from April through June, users film themselves holding up their prom dress and lip-syncing to the track. Right as Petty sings "take me as i come, cause I can't stay long," the video transitions to them fully dressed and ready for the night.
The sound has been used in nearly 1 million posts, introducing one of Petty's most beloved songs to a whole new generation.
@avamhanson senior prom 🩷 #prom#dress#fyp
♬ Mary Jane's Last Dance - Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
And with that, it's no coincidence that the GreatestHits album from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is currently sitting at No. 10 on Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart, moving up steadily over the past several weeks.
The classic record features hits like "Free Fallin'" and "Something in the Air," but it's "Mary Jane's Last Dance" that appears to be driving the resurgence.
In the early 1990s, Petty was focused on getting out of MCA Records and over to Warner Bros. He agreed to write two new songs for the compilation in exchange for his release.
He held up his end of the bargain and accidentally wrote one of the greatest tracks of his career in the process.
At the time, Petty was running on empty, preoccupied with recording Wildflowers. He had no desire to pull songs from that project for a hits package he hadn't wanted to make in the first place.
Producer Rick Rubin, already on board for Wildflowers, agreed to produce the two new tracks as well. Petty handed him a cassette of unreleased demos as a starting point.
"It wasn't like, ‘These are great new songs,'" Rubin recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016. "It was more like, ‘Listen to these. See if you hear anything.'"
Nothing on the tape grabbed Rubin at first. But tucked between two songs was a brief riff, "like after someone tuned up, just the first chords they played."
"So I called Tom and was like, ‘Hey, this whole phrase is really good. You may want to write this song.'" Petty gave it a shot and wrote "Mary Jane's Last Dance," which went on to become his first Billboard Top 20 single of the 1990s.
According to Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, though, the song came very close to being called something else.
"It was called ‘Indiana Girl,'" he told SongFactsin a 2003 interview. "The first chorus was, ‘Hey, Indiana girl, go out and find the world.'"
"We cut the song and Tom was singing the chorus," Campbell recalled, "and he decided he just couldn't get behind singing about ‘Hey, Indiana Girl.'" About a week later, Petty came back with something "better," and the chorus became "Last dance with Mary Jane."
As for who Mary Jane actually is, Petty kept that to himself for years. The one thing he did reveal, in a January 2010 Mojo interview, was that Mary Jane is the same woman from "American Girl," only "with a few hard knocks" along the way.
Related: 1972 Rock Classic Ranked No. 1 Defines the 'Soft-Rock Highway Sound'
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This story was originally published June 1, 2026 at 5:01 PM.