The Tom Petty Project

Today’s episode is being released on what would have been Tom’s 76th birthday. It was the date very specifically chosen by my guest, Robin Vincent for the release of her latest Robin Shakedown album, "I Don’t Know Lady, I Just Work Here". Robin was on the show back in December after I saw her blow the roof off in Gainesville at last year’s Tom Petty Weekend. Since then, I’ve become a hug...

This week's episode is the fifth installment The Petty 8ight! I love talking to Pettyheads, musicians, and other people who have been influenced by Tom or his music in myriad ways, but I thought it would be neat to see what non-fans, or non-hardcore fans think of Tom's music if I threw deeper cuts at them. My latest #Petty8ight guest is the wonderful radio host, a top notch podcaster, seas...

The track comes out firing on all cylinders with those aggressively swept ascending notes. Yet again, we’re being treated to something that’s a million miles from anything we’ve heard before. Mike and Scott Thurston are in complete harmonic lockstep here and Tom tells Mike Mettler, “There are a lot of dual guitars on it, so Scott and Mike worked a long time on the double harmony parts. They rehear...

Here's the second of this special two parter episode. As a reminder, on the day this episode drops, Jake Thistle’s full length label debut album, A Stranger by Design, is now available on all streaming platforms. Part one of this chat saw us catch up since we last chatted and this part of the conversation sees is dig deep into the set of songs that make up the new record. We go through all thi...

As this episode drops, our pal Jake Thistle has released his full length label debut album, A Stranger by Design. As always, Jake very graciously gave me an overgenerous amount of his time to chat about the album but also about all the things he’s been up to since we last saw talked. This first part of the episode covers the 2025 Tom Petty Weekend in Gainesville, his experience during his time on...

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 the snare, it’s Scott Thurston’s blues harp that draws there ear - with Mike’...

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 a "deep cut" is? Well, first of all, the song couldn't have charted on the Billboard 200 chart. Then, we limi...

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 delicious craft beers. He asked me if I’d ever heard this song. I clearly hadn’t reached Mojo in my Petty deep...

We were due to start Season Fifteen today and start thinking about Mojo, but the day of recording, well the legend that was Dolly Parton passed away and I decided to write an episode in her honour. I’ll come completely clean - I could never call myself more than a greatest hits fan of Dolly’s music because I haven’t listened to a lot of it, but every song I’ve ever heard her sing I’ve enjoyed, par...

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 band member other than Tom”  Here are the answers. See how many voices you remember! Thanks to all my guest...

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 the Heartbreakers has rocketed up my list of, not just favourite bands, but bands I would put head to head aga...

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...

“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 exception...

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 tremolo a...

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...

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 Jo...

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 th...

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 spri...

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 he hadn’t written T...

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 is...

“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”...

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 euph...

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 liv...

“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 th...