The Tom Petty Project

This is top tier songwriting for me. When you have a platform and you can take a risk by punching up at people who have power, I think it’s good to do it now and again. If you can take that polemic and wrap it in a powerful, simple, stomping track like Joe, then I’m all in. There’s a theatrical element to the song that you could easily imagine fitting a full broadway production. You could see the lights strobe out on those relentle...

Tom is hugely proud of this song. In Conversations with Tom Petty, he tells author Paul Zollo, “Dreamville” is one of the best songs I ever wrote. That was about innocence.” And it’s this innocence that contrasts so starkly and so effectively with the corporate interference in The Last DJ, or the commodification of Johnny’s art in Money Becomes King. Without this contrast the more belligerent songs the album could easily take on a ...

This disconnect between the artist and the audience is one of the subjects that Tom uses to explore the theme of greed that was the overarching construct behind the album. So this leads me to another quote from Tom in that 2002 interview that really does just get down to the nub of the matter. He asks; “How much money do you need?” And yes, I know that Tom was a multi-millionaire, but that was off the back of his creative work and ...

The specificity of the song got Tom into a little bit of trouble and the single was banned on a lot of stations who didn’t reach for the deeper meaning and saw it as a direct attack on radio itself. In 2010, Tom told Mojo UK, “Radio was just a metaphor. ‘The Last DJ’ was really about losing our moral compass, our moral centre. We don’t care who gets hurt any more in the quest for the dollar. That was what I was trying to say.”

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I didn’t want to start the new season in earnest while I was away as I knew I wouldn’t have as much time to prep and barely any to record and edit, so I wanted to get a special episode and was trying to think of what to do to ease into the season.

These two dates in 2002 completely destroy the conventional wisdom that you don’t go to see a "legacy act" to hear music from their new record. Hearing this album played live in this ...

Today’s episode is a fantastic chat I had with my friend Eric Senich, who has been on the show previously, back in October of last year. As well as being an outstanding podcaster and rock historian, Eric also spent a large part of his early career as a DJ, so I thought it would be interesting to talk to him about the nature of the industry and how and why freeform DJ’s like Jim Ladd were such an important part of the culture and de...

Rich is back to share his answers to my 10 questions? He's in cover bands that deal with Tom, Jeff Lynne, and George Harrison's musical output, so that question is a slam dunk, right? Which gig will he want to travel back in time to see? And which song is he going to duet on? It isn't one that's been picked thus far!

You can find Rich's music and bands here!

Rich Gibson: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1i6cM8YWiIOAyQwp2NXxjp?...

Today’s episode is a fan chat with a musician who’s be following along with the podcast for a while now and is a fellow Northern Englishman. Rich Gibson is a singer, songwriter, and musician as a solo artist and with the bands Spring and Indigo Slink, as well as being part of three different Wilbury’s-related tribute acts, The Petty Heartbreakers, Ultimate ELO and The Pretend Beatles! We had a fantastic chat about Rich’s backg...

Well, we've covered all the songs on Echo now, so that can only mean one thing! That's right. It's time for John Paulsen to join me again to wrap up the twelfth album and dig into the vinyl age, whether fifteen songs is too many, and of course, a whole lot of back and forth about the album! As always, it was great to hang with John for an hour and dive into the darkest work in Tom's catalogue.

“One more night, God I've had to fight. To keep my line of sight on what's real”. That opening line really acts as a double underline on the pain and weariness that Tom has explored lyrically throughout much of his twelfth album. When author Paul Zollo mentions this in Conversations with Tom Petty, asking “Can you keep some perspective, being within the music industry, on the meaning and impact an album can have to some guy who is ...

Wolfie is back to answer my ten "quick fire" questions, which seem to be taking longer and longer! His pick for favourite Heartbreaker came as a surprise but his three words to describe Tom Petty are pretty fantastic! Don't forget to go check out Greg's music on Soundcloud (links below) and if you're in the Connecticut area, make sure you check out when his band Accidental Breakdown is playing!

Today’s episode is a fan chat with a musician and podcaster who I’ve gotten to know a little over the last 12 months or so and wanted to learn more about. Greg Wolfe, or Wolfie as he’s more commonly known in the podcast universe, is a bass player and band leader for the Connecticut-based band Accidental Breakdown. He’s also one of the co-hosts of the Regarding Series of podcasts which breaks down a much-maligned album each season t...

There’s a weight to the arrangement of this song, accentuated by that heavy kick pattern that Steve Ferrone opts for, along with Tom’s deliberate persistence in landing on the root note at the end of his phrases that makes this one compelling. It’s also noteworthy in not really having a defined chorus. We do have that A section and B section, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a chorus, then you have a very short bridge at the end ...

Welcome to a special episode of the Tom Petty Project where I’m going to take a break from our usual scheduling to pay tribute to one of the most influential performers of all time. I am your host and today’s episode is dedicated to the life and work of Ozzy Osbourne.

It’s often been remarked that Mike sometimes sounds like Tom when he sings. If you listen to the Dirty Knobs albums you do hear some of those inflections peeking out from time to time, as you’d expect. But this goes both ways and I think Tom actually sounds a lot like Mike on About to Give Out - particularly in the verses. If you heard this on a Dirty Knobs record I don’t think you’d immediately catch that it was Tom and not Mike.

"Pharmacists aren't here to save rock and roll. They don't have the budget, or the jackets. But they are *trying*, in a landscape where most bands are too busy refreshing their socials to finish a bridge.

It’s an affirmation that after thinking about this problem, there’s a conviction to follow an ideal, if not a known direction yet. Whatever the direction we end up taking, it has to be something that we have certainty of authenticity. We’re not going to take a chance on something that feels half-dressed or unfinished, or flimsy in its intent. This course has to be real. I think a lot of us spend an awful lot of our lives being pull...

 I think this is a perfectly neat, tidy, compact, fun little bouncy piece of music, with a nicely constructed, easy to remember lyric. The problem is, this one has always felt to me like Tom could crank out something like this on the way to the grocery store in about 5 minutes, on any given day of the week. It’s pretty much the only song on this album that I think is really safe and could really be considered filler.

It’s interesting that Mike has never dusted this one off with the Dirty Knobs and I think this goes back to him talking about how difficult a period this was and given the circumstances around its conception you can see why it might be ground he wouldn’t want to revisit. The song was a mainstay on the Echo tour however and in "Spotlight on a Heartbreaker" series, which appeared on the official website many years ago and saw fans em...