Tom Petty sat down for an interview with the LA Times a few days before he passed away unexpectedly after suffering cardiac arrest. Here are some highlights from that final interview:
On the popular, critical, and financial affirmation that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers found in 2017:
“This year has been a wonderful year for us. This has been that big slap on the back we never got.”
On his SiriusXM radio channel and his radio show Tom Petty's Buried Treasure:
“I love doing my ‘Buried Treasure’ show. It keeps me listening like I used to do. I always listen. I could come home and I would spend the rest of the night just lying on the floor or the sofa listening to albums. It was like a movie to me. I still do really, and doing the radio show ensures that I’ll be sitting there listening.”
On needing to slow down:
“I just have to learn to rest a little bit, like everyone’s telling me. I need to stop working for a period of time...It’s hard for me ... If I don’t have a project going, I don’t feel like I’m connected to anything. I don’t even think it’s that healthy for me. I like to get out of bed and have a purpose.”
On songwriting:
“It’s kind of a lonely work, because you just have to keep your pole in the water. I always had a little routine of going into whatever room I was using at the time to write in, and just staying in there till I felt like I got a bite. I compare it to fishing: There’s either a fish in the boat or there’s not. Sometimes you come home and you didn’t catch anything and sometimes you caught a huge fish. But that was the work part of it to me. … I just remember being excited when I had a song done, and I knew I had a song in my pocket, I always felt really excited about it.”
On being in the studio:
“To go into a studio and hear a band play [one of his new songs] for the first time is always exciting. And usually when they play it, it became something I hadn’t even pictured. Yes, I love the studio. I love the studio as much as I love playing live, easily. I’m pretty much in one every day, and I’m still at that.”
On his love of touring:
“On the back side of your 60s, most people aren’t working. This keeps us young. I think it keeps me young. When I see people I knew from earlier in life and I run into them now, they’re very different than me. And they look different. I think this has kept us all thinking young and feeling young.”
On what would case The Heartbreakers to break up at this stage of the game:
“If one of us went down, or if one of us died — God forbid — or got sick … We’re all older now. Then we’d stop. I think that would be the end of it, if someone couldn’t do it...The thing about the Heartbreakers is, it’s still holy to me. There’s a holiness there. If that were to go away, I don’t think I would be interested in it, and I don’t think they would.
We’re a real rock ’n’ roll band — always have been. And to us, in the era we came up in, it was a religion in a way. It was more than commerce, it wasn’t about that. It was about something much greater. It was about moving people, and changing the world, and I really believed in rock ’n’ roll — I still do. I believed in it in its purest sense, its purest form. … It’s unique to have a band that knows each other that long and that well. I’m just trying to get the best I can get out of it, as long as it remains holy.”
Read the full interview at the LA Times.
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