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…

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…

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…

Origins Series

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…