The Tom Petty Project

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.

Rock music doesn't die - it just downsizes. And Pharmacists are out here propping it up with their own shoulders, one open wound at a time."

Those are words of KWR Radion DJ Jim McCaulty, and I thought they might serve as a ...

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.

Song :...

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...

OK, let’s get into the song! In Conversations with Tom Petty, Tom tells author Paul Zollo “I wrote that on the drive to the studio in Bugs’ truck. My trusty roadie Bugs was driving me to work—and I got this idea for this song, “Billy The Kid.” I pulled out a pad as we were going over Topanga Canyon with all those curves, so I was really writing on the edge of the paper, and back and forth in the truck. And I wrote it all out on the...

Today’s episode is a very focused conversation I had with my pal and previous guest Nic Apostoleries. When we chatted way back in 2022, Nic told me that when I reached Echo, that he’d love to come onto the show and talk about it. We dive specifically into the lyrics on this season’s album and speculate on possible meanings to specific songs and overall moods and intent that album may hold. As a professional in the mental health fie...

I’d said in the closing to last week’s episode that I get a strong connection between this song and the Jeff Lynne era of Tom’s work. So, close your eyes, listen to the first four bars, and imagine coming out of Too Good to Be True and into this song. It feels as natural a transition as anything in the catalogue to me. I think it’s partially the blend of those two acoustic guitars panned left and right sitting underneath that crunc...

This is a very grown up song and as we discussed on Wildflowers, it’s a song that wouldn’t resonate as much with a person in their teens or early twenties as it would with someone who has lived and lost. You need that weight of experience to truly feel the bone-weariness that Tom projects at times and the hesitant accusations he ends with. It’s a collage of emotions and narrative dissonance that perfectly fleshes out what a broken ...

In Conversations with Tom Petty, author Paul Zollo tells Tom that he finds the song has “kind of a British, early Beatles sound” to which to Tom replies “Yeah. It’s funny how you see these influences go round and round, because I was thinking of Don Everly, that sort of melody. But it does have a mid-Sixties British sound. And he was obviously influencing them.” Paul then observes “Like one of those old songs, it’s very short—under...

Lyrically, we get this short story, in typical Tom fashion where he’s just giving us the outlines and parts of a narrative. We start out standing by the highway in boots and silver spurs. And we end on the interstate across the Georgia line, which is maybe a teeny nod back to Tweeter and the Monkey Man. In fact, here’s an idea, maybe the protagonist of this song is actually Jan! I can imagine her heading south after the fiasco in J...

I love the line “She’s a sweet young thing. Brings me dreams in a box she made for me”. That’s a very Petty-esque little piece of imagery that he throws in early to add to the very dreamy quality of the piece. In Conversations with Tom Petty, Tom tells author Paul Zollo that “The words changed several times in that song. But I finally got it to where I liked it. I think I worked on that one a lot more than any of the others.” And w...

The song is a powerful push back against an abusive relationship on behalf of the woman Tom loved. The way the lyrics are organized, with the verses describing the abuse in the past tense and the uplifting chorus being in the present tense really drives home that idea that “No longer will you be a slave. No longer will you have to crawl”. It’s a celebration of liberation and freedom that is specific to a personal situation but agai...

Sonically, you could definitely hear this one sitting happily on Mojo. But I also sometimes feel that this is the most Wildflowers-sounding of all the songs on Echo. If you found out that it was another of the songs that hadn’t been included on that album, it wouldn’t really surprise you. In Conversations With Tom Petty, the only thing that Tom tells author Paul Zollo about this song is that “That’s great. That should have been a s...

 I, along with I’m sure many of you Pettyheads, consider this one of Tom’s finest works. It’s an absolute masterpiece in songwriting, lyrical precision, and arrangement. As Tom tells Paul Zollo, “It was a great example of The Heartbreakers at work. On my own I would have never arrived at that arrangement of the song. But they really took it somewhere that I would have never got to by myself.” The mixture of light and shade the...

Like Songs and Music for She’s The One, somewhere around half of the songs on Echo were never played live. Tom tells Paul Zollo “I was kind of glad to get to another place after Echo. I was kind of glad to get somewhere else. I don’t know why, but I kind of felt like we came back into the sun after that.”

And this idea of a darkness hovering over this period in Tom’s life definitely permeates through elements of this record.

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After a little bit of a false start, John and Kevin settle into a fun chat about soundtrack composition, how Ed Burn managed to lock in Wildflowers era-Tom Petty to be his musical director, why Tom took over the project wholesale and why this may just be the most underappreciated album in Tom's catalogue! Do we need two versions of two different songs? What about the covers? Tune in to find out!

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Airport is a tight little bundle of keyboard virtuosity from Benmont Tench with a lazy, groove-soaked accompaniment from Howie Epstein and Chris Trujillo in the rhythm section. This piece is hugely interesting in two different, very interesting ways. First of all, I’m pretty sure (given the credits in the album liner notes) that Tom didn’t play on it. Second, given that the melodic contributions would almost certainly have come spo...

It's curious that the two songs that reference California were both left off the final Wildflowers release; perhaps Tom being self-conscious about being too prescriptive and direct in that vein. Hung Up and Overdue has a very simple, very direct lyric which sits atop a wonderful arrangement and doesn’t need to do too much of the heavy lifting. It’s almost like Mike’s more reserved guitar part. We do get a little shine and sparkle i...