When the album finally dropped, people who hadn’t heard this song must have been slightly surprised to be assaulted with a howling harmonica part straight out of the traps. Almost every Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album opens with a volley of guitar. THe guitar is still there, but after Steve Ferrone’s double shot on…

For Episode 300, I figured we should do something a little special. So I called up my pal John Paulsen to combine the two things he does best; fantasty drafts and playlists! We each had fifteen picks from the Tom Petty deep cuts catalogue. It’s a big volume of songs! How did we decide what…

Season Fifteen begins. The first song I remember hearing from this album was I Should Have Known It. But I didn’t hear it on the radio. A good friend of mine, Kris Klyne, who is also an immensely talented songwriter and musician, was over at my place as we were sharing a couple of rather…

In Memoriam

Obviously, Tom is the primary focus of most of this project, but as I said last week, one of the joys of the last five years has been discovering how astonishingly good a band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were. One of the ten questions I always ask my guests is “Who is your favourite…

Something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit this week is how my relationship with Tom’s music has changed over the years that I’ve been doing the show now. The very short answer to this is I’ve come to regard him as one of the truly great songwriters in history. Over time, Tom Petty and…

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…

“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…

Recovering Petty #1

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…