Tom Petty on New Mudcrutch LP and Why He's Done With Solo Albums

Earlier this week, we chatted with Tom Petty about the Confederate Flag and his regret over using it as a stage prop back in 1985. But politics weren't all we discussed. He gave us an update on the upcoming Mudcrutch album and the band's likely tour, future plans for the Heartbreakers, a forthcoming LP of songs cut from Wildflowers and why he's unlikely to ever play one of his classic albums in concert or make another solo record.

I spoke to Mike Campbell recently and he said the plan was for Mudcrutch to convene in August to begin work on a new album. Is that still the plan?
Yeah, yeah. It's coming up.

Are the songs all written?
I wish they were. I'm kind of frantically working on material for that right now, really over the past month. The good thing is that everybody brings in a song so I don't have to write 12 or something. But I'm working on it. Some of the most fun I have is those Mudcrutch sessions. It was just so much fun and I think that's one of the better albums I was ever involved in. I'm hoping it's something like that again. It'd kind of intimidating to have to follow it up.

Where are you going to record it?
We're gonna use the Heartbreakers studio. We have a big Heartbreakers club house out in the valley, which is where we made the last one. I imagine most of it will be done there. The wild thing about the last album is that the vocals and even the harmony vocals were done live on the floor of the studio at the same time we played it, so there weren't many overdubs. I'm hoping we can do that again. They play their solos on the fly, so every take is a little different, but in the end you just go for the best one. We made that record in ten days.

Do you think this one will also be that fast?
I don't know. I'm gonna see.

It's great to watch you playing with Tom Leadon and Randall Marsh again. It's clear how much everyone is enjoying themselves.
I know. Playing the bass is so much fun for me because I started out as a bassist. I did that until the Heartbreakers formed, so being back in that position and playing with Randall is just so much fun. I love playing with him. He's such a good drummer, and he's a drummer that plays to the vocal rather than being hung up on the bass and stuff. And Tommy's just out of sight on the guitar. We spent our teenager years singing together, so we have a good blend.

Are you going to tour when the album is done?
Sure. I want to get over to the East Coast with it too. Last time we were kinda under the gun because there was a big Heartbreakers tour coming up not long after that, so we didn't have a lot of time. We kind of just ran up and down the West Coast real fast and did a fairly long stand at the Troubadour. Those were really fun gigs. It's a totally different thing than the Heartbreakers. It's a different rhythm section. It's a different style of music. Just writing for this group is interesting because I have to change my mindset from where I'm at today with the Heartbreakers.

How many songs do you have so far?
I think I have four, but I'm working on a couple more of them.

Onto the Heartbreakers, those shows you did a couple years ago at the Beacon and the Fonda where pretty amazing. Do you want to do more theater gigs in the future?
It changed my whole way of thinking about playing live. Two days after playing the Fonda we were playing in front of about 100,000 people at Bonnaroo. It was like, "Oh yeah, there's this too." Right away we started to work some of the stuff from the little shows into the big shows. I love playing all kind of places, but I don't think we could carry on any more if we don't slip that kind of thing in from time to time. You grow as a band by doing that. I love the freedom of it.

The Allman Brothers broke up this year, ending their Beacon residency. You guys could just take over, come play every March or something.
Pick up the torch! I'd love to do that. It's complicated business-wise because, and I don't know this for sure, but I would bet that it costs us money to do those shows. But I could figure that out, you know? I loved it there, and the Fonda was good, too. At the Fonda, though, we had big electrical buzz onstage that we couldn't quite control, which kind of irritated me. Other than that, it was great. I love the whole idea of doing a different show every night.

It was great to watch you do a song like "Walls," "Billy the Kid" or that cover of Chuck Berry's "Carol" when you guys fumbled the intro.
The funny thing about that "Carol" is that we came in at two different keys. Part of the band thought it was in one key and another part thought it was another one. The exact same thing happened at a Mudcrutch show in 1970, with the same fucking song. We played it in rehearsal in one key, tried it in another and then decided to go back to the original key. I guess somebody missed a meeting. When we did that again, it was just killing us laughing that all those years later, the same song, we did the same thing.

I loved that. It showed this isn't some perfectly-rehearsed Broadway play or something.
It was fun. It was kind of like, "Well, what are you gonna do? Arrest me? I'll just start again and hope I can get it right."

What's happening with the Wildflowers box set? I've been hearing about that for years.
It's not really a box set. They have the second album of the double album that was originally made. We are going to release the second disc that hasn't been released before. I like it a lot. The original plan was to release it as as the complete Wildflowers album with the original album and this. And Warner Bros. came back to us and said, "Look, this is far too good a record to just send straight to the catalog racks. We're going to put it out as its own album." I was behind that decision too. It's done and we're eventually going to put it out. It's just sitting there finished, so I'm waiting to hear when they're going to put it out.

After the Mudcrutch album and tour, do you think you'll do a solo record or a Heartbreakers record?
I don't think I'm going to do any more solo records. I don't see that on the horizon. Well, the truth is that I would call these guys to play anyway. There's nobody I'm longing to play with, and I'd rather play with them. At this point in my life, it's such an honor to play with Benmont and Mike. It's just my favorite band to play with. I just don't want to make a solo record. I don't see the point.

So many of your peers have done tours in recent years when they play one of their classic albums straight through. Does that idea appeal to you?
That sounds really dull to me. I've heard about that and it sounds dull. Why would you want to do that? Records aren't made, at least mine, to be concerts. They aren't paced in that way. I don't know that doing one all the way through would make a great concert.

I guess they do it because it sells more tickets and the concert becomes this big event.
Well, that's fine it the big event is actually good. The Stones did one this year where they did Sticky Fingers, but I noticed they changed the running order. I see why you'd have to do that because otherwise you wouldn't have the pulse of a show.

Jagger told me they couldn't do it in stadiums because there's simply too many ballads.
Exactly. That's the thing with stadiums and arenas. The pacing of the show is really important. You're trying to keep a lot of people on the same page. There's an art to doing that.

I'm hoping he again offers an uncompressed cd or flac dl (I don't need the vinyl). Petty has lately offered his cd's in both compressed & uncompressed editions.

I'm hoping the same thing, and I can't imagine he wouldn't continue that trend. The uncompressed CD did sound a lot better than the standard CD. If you cared about vinyl, you would be very happy with the sound & the packaging.

Amazon has the vinyl edition up now:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DEMEV8M/?tag=imwan-20

And another bump to add the tracklist up top.

Tom Petty Won’t Back Down



Walking through Tom Petty’s Malibu mansion feels like being backstage at one of his shows. Band members wander in and out of rooms filled with instruments and set up in his home studio. On the walls hang pictures of his mentors, from a painted portrait of Bob Dylan to a drawing of George Harrison.

On the afternoon we meet, he’s sitting on the couch with his dog, Ryder, a golden lab with a red bandana tied around his neck. Alternating between drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, he talks about how he’s gearing up for a reunion tour and new album with his first real band, Mudcrutch. The musician, known for hit songs such as “American Girl” (1976) and “Free Fallin’” (1989), hasn’t been on tour in two years, and it’s a departure from his usual band, the Heartbreakers. But for Mr. Petty, 65, reuniting with Mudcrutch is a kind of homecoming.

He formed the band in 1970 in Gainesville, Fla., where he grew up, and its members feel like family to him—albeit “a family of mentally maladjusted people,” he says with a laugh. They all moved to Los Angeles but then broke up after releasing one album. Two members became part of the Heartbreakers.

Mr. Petty says that he wanted to reunite Mudcrutch because he thought the album they produced was one of the best he’s ever done. At the same time, he recently launched a radio channel on SiriusXM, in which he interviews other musicians and plays music. “I can’t stand to be bored,” he says. “I don’t cope with it—I’m not the best me I can be when I’m bored.” Over the years, he has immersed himself in his work to get through troubled times in his life.

Since childhood, he has listened to music as a way to escape. Mr. Petty says that his father, an Air Force veteran who worked as an insurance salesman, used to beat and verbally harass him. (His father died in 1999, and they never reconciled.) Going to therapy in the 1990s, he says, helped him to get through the anger and depression from his childhood. “I could really get mad easily, and it wasn’t attractive, and [after therapy] that went away for the most part, and I became somebody different.”

After Mudcrutch, Mr. Petty formed the Heartbreakers in 1976. The group has since sold more than 80 million records world-wide. He still plans on working with the Heartbreakers and hopes to put together a new album of extra songs recorded for their 1994 “Wildflowers” but never released.

He says that while the musical side of his life has gone well, “being a person is a challenge, but I think I’m a better one than I used to be.” He suffered through depression in the mid-1990s after divorcing his first wife and then again around 2001 when his close friend George Harrison died. (The two formed the Traveling Wilburys along with Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison in the late 1980s.)

His second wife, Dana York, helped him to get through it. “My wife is really an angel,” he says, adding that she even puts up with hosting band members in their house. “She says it’s like living with a bunch of old pirates.”

Mr. Petty spends time in the studio every day and still struggles with songwriting. The song he had the toughest time writing was “The Waiting,” the lead single on his 1981 album, “Hard Promises.” (“The waiting is the hardest part / Every day you see one more card / You take it on faith, you take it to the heart / The waiting is the hardest part.”)

It took him months to get everything right. “I had the chorus, and I had that main 12-string riff, but I couldn’t figure out how to fill it in,” he says. Before putting together a new album, Mr. Petty writes four or five “really bad songs” before he begins in earnest.

When he isn’t working, he likes to listen to music, but he’s finding less time for it. “These days life is really filled with so much information, shovels full of information being thrown at you every second, that you’ve got to kind of decide, ‘I’m going to put up a wall here.’” He has no interest in social media. “I have a life, so I don’t have to invent one on Facebook,” he says.

Mr. Petty prefers old recordings by artists like the late Merle Haggard and the Zombies, ideally on vinyl, to most contemporary music. “Young people’s music…sounds sort of like plastic, compressed, phony music to me,” he says.

Mr. Petty says that fans often come up to him and tell him they met their spouse while listening to one of his songs. “Glad to be there” is his response. Others say, “Thank you for being the soundtrack to my life.” He’ll respond, “Well, hope it was good—it’s kind of been the soundtrack to my life.”

At this stage, Mr. Petty says that he isn’t looking to further his career. He just wants to have a good time. “My hope is to carry on with some dignity,” he says. That includes refusing to allow his songs to be used in commercials. “I turn down millions every year,” he says. “I don’t want [the music] to be known for a beer or an orange juice,” he says.

Next month, he will go on tour with Mudcrutch. He isn’t a fan of touring; he doesn’t like having to be in a certain place every day. “I’ve really got other stuff I’d like to do before I’m dead,” he adds, like write and record more music. After a show, he says, he has so much adrenaline that he has to pace around his hotel room for hours to unwind.

Still, he knows he can’t complain. “If you’re not getting some kind of buzz from 20,000 people losing their minds, you’ve got a bad ‘tude,” he says. “Or else something’s just not hooked up.”