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 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...

In my mind’s eye, I see a younger couple, maybe mid to late twenties, driving an old cadillac along a dark desert highway... A kid, about 7 or 8 years is in the back seat having a bad dream: not exactly a nightmare but one of those dreams that feels you feeling really unsettled for the rest of the day once you wake up and you can’t quite remember it only, the feeling it’s left you with. The verses...

Jack is a peculiar song. It doesn’t have a typical structure and it’s much more a mood piece. As I said, I sort of consider this one to be a chance encounter on the Highway Tom is taking us down. We don’t spend any quality time with this character but we’re left with a slightly gnawing, maybe slightly uneasy feeling about bumping into him. He’s gonna get his baby back and we’re not really sure whe...

Every now and then I try to think about my top ten Tom Petty deep cuts. There are so many that I love and that I’ve discovered, rediscovered, or come to appreciate so much more as I’ve been on this podcast journey, but Down South is at the very top table for me in that regard. Going down south for the first time to the Tom Petty Weekend last year made this song resonate doubly with me. Not only do...

“You’re flirting with time”, Tom sings. And I like that idea of not fully committing to time, just flirting with it. That’s definitely how life feels when you’re in your twenties and thirties. You don’t really have to enter into a serious relationship with time because there’s so much of it still ahead. You can mess around on it and you know it will always be there when you get home. There’s an im...

Saving Grace is the work of a middle-aged man who fully knows himself and knows how to articulate the past and the present in three very vivid dimensions. Critical to retaining the song’s pathos though, Tom doesn’t project a future down this new path. It’s important that Square One is here and now. It’s important that being present in a moment and recognizing that every day and every minute is a c...

“You keep running for another place To find that saving grace” probably doesn’t hit in the same place for most Pettyheads as “Most things I worry about never happen anyway” but I think there’s a comparable profundity to it. That search for spiritual, or social, or emotional redemption is a journey and one that can often feel just out of reach and unattainable, but you run on anyway. Maybe it isn’t...

There’s a languidity that floats through a lot of this record; Square One, Night Driver, Turn this Car Around, This Old Down, and The Golden Rose... These are songs to cruise to. They’re songs to be chewed on and savoured rather than hastily gulped down. You can feel the evening sun warming your skin as you drive, with the top down, listening to this album before arriving at a house in the woods,...

The wonderful John Paulsen is back to talk all things Last DJ! John actually saw one of the two dates at the Olympic, so I get to ask him about that, we dive into the potential reasons why we've never had any previously unreleased tracks surface from this album (including the mysterious Maggie song!), and why half a concept album might not have landed with a wider listening audience. As always, th...

Everything about this song appeals to me. The soft-loud dynamic of the verse and chorus, coupled with the 4/4 3/4 switch from verse to chorus, along with the minor to major switch. It’s just perfectly internally oppositional. The bridge is one of my very favourites that we have in the entire catalogue with that swinging half funk groove and that outro is just absolutely fire. Can’t Stop the Sun br...

It’s that time of year for me to look back at what I was listening to in the past twelve months and give you some recommendations! I’ve listened to a ton of music in the past year, plenty of which was new to me. Gainesville exposed me to a ton of new indie artists, some of whom I’ve had the good fortune to speak to. I did decide to limit this to only vinyl albums I bought this year, rather than be...

Steve Ursell is back to run through my ten questions and give me his thoughts on his favourite album, which version of Walls he prefers, and which song he'd want to cover with the Heartbreakers. Steve picks a fantastic British artist to cover a Tom Petty song, he picks a great gig to want to go back to see, and a certain autobiography may have coloured his choice for favourite Heartbreaker, other...

This week, before we wrap up the last song from The Last DJ, I’m sharing a conversation that I had with an English gent that I met through my Queen podcast and someone I’ve gotten to know a little over the last two or three years named Steve Ursell. Steve has kinda been discovering Tom’s catalogue in real time through this podcast, so I thought it would be really interesting to talk to someone who...

Robin Vincent is back to give me her answers to my ten questions. You wouldn't necessarily think that World of Warcraft would play a significant role in defining Robin's favourite album, she drops a bombshell on me about a couple of singers she just doesn't jive with and her answer to my question about which song she'd join Tom and the boys on stage for is perhaps the best answer anyone's given ye...

Today’s bonus episode is a fantastic chat with another artist I was very fortunate to see perform down at the Tom Petty Weekend in Gainesville. Robin Vincent, whose band, Robin Shakedown was one of the most vibrant, energetic and very very cool acts from the weekend. I had to reach out to see if she’d be willing to talk to me about her love for Tom and his music and subsequently, found and fell in...