The Tom Petty Project

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 Ehtan 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...