Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft

in Art, Music | October 6th, 2017 1 Comment

Briefly not­ed: Give this wide-rang­ing inter­view with Tom Pet­ty some time. Record­ed in 2014, Pet­ty talks with inter­view­er Jian Ghome­shi about his song­writ­ing craft. The writ­ing of songs, the rehearsal and record­ing process, the work in the stu­dio, it all gets cov­ered here. As he talks, one thing comes across: What­ev­er tal­ents he had, Pet­ty put in the hard work. He and the Heart­break­ers mas­tered their instru­ments, kept get­ting bet­ter, and did­n’t take short cuts, to the point where they could do mag­i­cal things togeth­er in the record­ing stu­dio.

Watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 below, where, at one point he says, “I’m doing the best I can. You can’t say I did­n’t try real­ly hard because I’m real­ly try­ing hard to be good.” The val­ue of trying–trying consistently–can nev­er be under­stat­ed.

Note: Some of the same themes get echoed in Tom Pet­ty’s final inter­view, which he gave to the LA Times last week. You can stream it here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 17-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Jour­ney Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Sound­tracks of Our Lives

Watch Tom Pet­ty (RIP) and the Heart­break­ers Per­form Their Last Song Togeth­er, “Amer­i­can Girl”: Record­ed on 9/25/17

Prince, Joined by Tom Pet­ty, Plays a Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solo On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps”


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  • yup yup says:
    October 6, 2017 at 6:16 am

    Tom Pet­ty had to work hard because he did­n’t have the tra­di­tion­al “bad boy” look of a rock star. Espe­cial­ly in a video age, his visu­als had to be twice as inter­est­ing among a sea of pout­ing pret­ty boys. I give him a lot of cred­it for his stay­ing pow­er and abil­i­ty to write hooks that appealed to lis­ten­ers in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and even today. Rest in Peace Tom!

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