The Tom Petty Project

Included on one of the discs in the Running Down a Dream documentary by Peter Bogdanovic, the release has been widely circulated in many bootleg forms and I think we’re long overdue a re-release! Wouldn’t it be great to have this upscaled to 4K and remastered. Heck, I’d even love a double vinyl release of this one for my collection. It’s a band at the top of their game, with absolutely nothing to lose, playi...

“I was doing fine on my own, selling from my own website privately, and right at the same time Tom Petty contacted me and told me he’d been secretly collecting my work, and wanted me to design an album cover for him. He and his wife have 6 paintings or so.”

Robert Deyber never became a household name in the manner of Dalí or Warhol, but within contemporary gallery circles he developed an exceptionally loyal fol...

Leading into the last verse, there’s some back masked, slightly distorted guitar, again over that suspended fourth chord before the arrangement drops back to let Bridgers’ voice really punch home the line “Now the wind is high and the rain is heavy and the water’s rising in the levee”. I talk lots on the show about “moments” in songs and THIS is the moment in this song for me. The slight tr...

Today's episode is a wide ranging conversation that I had with my friend Josh Caldwell. Josh and I met through a mutual love of Van Halen and the superb And the Podcast Will Rock, cohosted by my good pals Corey Morrissette and Mark Camire. We get into the weeds about guitars and guitarists and talk about what makes Mike special and why he was an indispensible part of the Heartbreakers formula!

If you want to find Josh's excelle...

My pal John Paulsen is back to run through Highway Companion with me. We get into the weeds about whether I'm overscoring the catalogue and as always, we take a shot a resequencing the albums in a different way according to our tastes. We also float a few ideas for special episodes that we can do once the main catalogue is complete and there were some fun ideas that came up!

If you want to find John, you can catch him over on B...

We often talk about album openers and closers and I’m sure my pal John Paulsen and I will get into that next week, but of all the songs that were included on this record, the opener and the closer just scream at you on Highway Companion. Both Saving Grace and The Golden Rose have momentum and hit that theme of travelling perfectly, but they do it in very different ways. Saving Grace soars above the scenery and exhilarates as ...

I’m thinking of this as part of a new occasional series that I can return to called “Origins” and will be about the songwriters and/or musicians that have shaped my musical tastes. Future episodes will definitely include people like Ray Davies of The Kinks, Edward Van Halen, Justin Currie of Del Amitri, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, Mark Knopfler, Steve Earle, and Paul McCartney, as names that spring immediately to...

Let’s talk about the lyrics to this one first. Tom goes on to say “You don’t have a lot of room to write a story in a song. So you have to be economical with your lines.” and we’ve remarked on that on so many occasions with Tom’s story songs - he usually gives us brief flashes of narrative before either zooming out, changing the POV or switching to a characters thoughts rather than their actions....

We’ve talked a few times this season about the fact that the album wasn’t finished when Tom played the songs for Paul Zollo. In the book, he tells Paul, “I still haven’t figured out where to put it in the sequence. Right now I have it at the end, but I don’t think it’s the perfect ending.” Earlier, he says “That was written in the middle of all the other things” and I wonder if ...

Specifics create dynamics. I love this idea.I watched Ethan Hawke talking about this in regards to acting and pretty much immediately thought, “The same applies to lyrics!” and figured that, as I have a podcast, I should figure out some thoughts on the topic! So what I want to do is go through a few examples again of times that this type of specificity crops up in Tom’s lyrics where perhaps it isn’t even nee...

“There's rain on the road And the faithful have gone. In a crowd all alone, Walking 'round in a song”. It’s a great little snapshot or vignette, as Tom so often gives us, of perhaps a wedding or some other celebration at a small roadside church. That feeling of being alone in a crowd is beautifully phrased by changing the order of the words; rather than All alone in a crowd, “in a crowd all alone” feel...

Night Driver is one of those perfect album tracks that you always want to hear on great records. There’s something to be said for albums where any song could basically be a single, but I tend to gravitate more towards albums that are very carefully curated around a central idea and Highway Companion is definitely one of those. This track sits on the second half of the record, coming after the euphoric Big Weekend, as a mood p...

The first verse contains one of my all time favourite lyrics. Not just one of my very favourite Tom Petty lyrics, just one of my favourite lyrics full stop. And it’s not a superb piece of word play or a huge emotionally charge line. It’s not a cuttingly brilliant philosophically brilliant observation - we get that later in the song - nor is it a playfully subversive line. It’s this line; “They live in a bric...

“Some friends of mine and me stayed up all through the night, Rockin' pretty steady 'til the sky went light And didn't go to bed, Didn't go to work. I picked up the telephone, Told the boss he was a jerk”. Come on. You don’t find better rock n roll lyrics than those. They come from a guy who’s done the time. Worked crummy jobs, worked crummy bars playing to uninteresting punters who want to see the strippers...

In my mind’s eye, I see a younger couple, maybe mid to late twenties, driving an old cadillac along a dark desert highway... A kid, about 7 or 8 years is in the back seat having a bad dream: not exactly a nightmare but one of those dreams that feels you feeling really unsettled for the rest of the day once you wake up and you can’t quite remember it only, the feeling it’s left you with. The verses are the phases o...

Jack is a peculiar song. It doesn’t have a typical structure and it’s much more a mood piece. As I said, I sort of consider this one to be a chance encounter on the Highway Tom is taking us down. We don’t spend any quality time with this character but we’re left with a slightly gnawing, maybe slightly uneasy feeling about bumping into him. He’s gonna get his baby back and we’re not really sure wh...

Every now and then I try to think about my top ten Tom Petty deep cuts. There are so many that I love and that I’ve discovered, rediscovered, or come to appreciate so much more as I’ve been on this podcast journey, but Down South is at the very top table for me in that regard. Going down south for the first time to the Tom Petty Weekend last year made this song resonate doubly with me. Not only does it tap into that con...

“You’re flirting with time”, Tom sings. And I like that idea of not fully committing to time, just flirting with it. That’s definitely how life feels when you’re in your twenties and thirties. You don’t really have to enter into a serious relationship with time because there’s so much of it still ahead. You can mess around on it and you know it will always be there when you get home. There&...

Saving Grace is the work of a middle-aged man who fully knows himself and knows how to articulate the past and the present in three very vivid dimensions. Critical to retaining the song’s pathos though, Tom doesn’t project a future down this new path. It’s important that Square One is here and now. It’s important that being present in a moment and recognizing that every day and every minute is a chance for r...