The Tom Petty Project

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 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 upl…

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 anot…

 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 …

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 g…

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 t…

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 i…

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…

I don’t think I’ve ever hidden or tried to hide the fact that Walls is one of my very favourite Tom Petty compositions. I think it’s essentially a perfect song. And this version is, as I say, an exer…

I would love to know if an extended version of this arrangement exists anywhere on the cutting room floor. I know that there was only one violinist, Lili Haydn, who I’m hoping to have on the podcast …

John and I got together to discuss the Petty Country and Bad Monkey Soundtrack releases and built a 16 track playlist that gives you a good idea of what to expect from each disc. We discussed what ma…

There’s a quality to this song that I’ve only really experienced once before. It makes me homesick for a place I’ve never lived in. The other time this has happened to me was, coincidentally, also Ca…

This one begins with piano as the main melodic focus, with Benmont Tench playing a lounge player style lick over top of a sumptuously dark and foreboding rhythm section. The drums are dry and present…

Beck’s Asshole is quite tender in places with a certain rustic charm and it’s not something you’d expect a middle aged rocker to want to explore. But when you really delve into it and rummage around …

Hope You Never is a fairly dark, bleak cut from a difficult album for Tom. It fits the timbre of the movie in places and you can see why it was chosen as one of the songs to transfer over to this rel…

“I dreamed you, I saw your face. Caught my lifeline, went drifting through space”. What an incredible way to say “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you and my life would never be the same agai…

I wanted to say a quick (well, not that quick!) goodbye to 2024 before kicking off the new year and figured I'd follow the lead of a great many music podcasters by telling you about some of the album…

It’s a wonderful little piece of fluffy Christmas fare. There’s no big message here, it’s just a nostalgic, whimsical throwback type song and I’m almost surprised that it wasn’t a co-write with Jeff …

The second installment of my Artist Conversation Series sees Matt Jaffe return to the show to talk about his fantastic new album, Gone Enough To Miss. It was a joy to nerd out over broad aspects as w…

First of all, Changed The Locks by Lucinda Williams is a fantastic song and her delivery of it is sublime and very intimate - a tone that is enhanced by the arrangement that is used on that recording…