Songfacts®:

• Not to be confused with the 2011 track by The View, this 1990s ballad is a favorite of Tom Petty's fans. It is also the song he "lost," as he explained to a live audience in a 1999 episode of VH1 Storytellers: "One time this guy come to me and asked me to write some music for his film and that's another way you can jog your mind into things. I wrote this song for him and I liked it so much I wanted to take it back, but he wouldn't let me take it back."
  
  The film is the 1996 comedy She's The One, for which Petty provided the bulk of the soundtrack. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England
• Two versions of the song appear in the film and on the soundtrack. The first, called "Walls (Circus)," has backing vocals by Lindsey Buckingham and plays over the opening credits. The other version, "Walls (No. 3)," has less instrumentation and appears near the end of the film.
• Tom Petty was going through a transitional phase when he wrote this song. In 1994, he released Wildflowers, his second album without The Heartbreakers (following Full Moon Fever in 1989). After touring for the album, his marriage fell apart, and in 1996 he got divorced from his first wife, Jane, whom he married in 1974. He was living on his own in a rented house when he wrote "Walls," which explores the swingline of life in very poetic terms, starting with the first verse:
  
  Some days are diamonds
  Some days are rocks
  Some doors are open
  Some roads are blocked
  
  In the end, it's a hopeful song, aimed at a girl with a heart so big she could "crush this town." She's bound to reach him eventually, because even walls fall down.
• When he played this live, Petty would typically do a downtempo, acoustic version, which is how he played it on Storytellers.
• The "Circus" version of this song got a high-end music video directed by Phil Joanou, who also did Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels." It takes place at a psychedelic circus, where the elephants are purple and the horses are green. It doesn't contain any footage from She's The One, but does feature cameos from two of its stars: Jennifer Aniston shows up is leaning against the tiger cage, and Edward Burns is the taxi driver.