Hello and welcome to the working songwriter. The show where today's best songwriters come to Talk Shop. I'm your host, Joe Pug. Each episode here, we host a

distinguished guest and we ask them to go deep on their inspiration, on their process, on the general

ups and downs of making a life in music. So, whether you're a grizzled veteran demanding your

own tour bus away from the rest of the band,

or else a scrappy upstart, ecstatic that you've written a beautiful new song until you realize

it's the exact same melody as Free Fallen.

This is your show, because ultimately it is what every writer seeks most.

An ironclad excuse to put off actually writing.

Hey everybody, it's the last Friday of October 2017, and I thank you for joining us.

Before we begin today's regularly scheduled show, we have to say goodbye to one of the best that ever was and that ever will be.

Thank you. His grandfather worked in a logging camp and was affectionately known as Pulp Wood.

His father was a hard-drinking insurance salesman who would alternately dispense beatings and lavish gifts such as a brand new Gibson

base. With his early bands, the sundowners, the epics, and mud crutch, he knocked around

school dances and the frat party circuit in Florida before

his ambitions sent him on a Homeric journey. He marched a plucky group of Gainesville

boys into the heart of Los Angeles and turned them into an American institution, the heartbreakers.

Tom Petty had a gift endowed to few others, and through tenacious

work, he honored that gift in a way that still fewer could, leaving us his listeners with a nearly

unrivaled bounty of American song. He broke on to the national scene in 1977 with the chiming, opening bars of American

Girl and remained squarely in the spotlight over the next two decades with a string of

iconic hits. Refugee, The Waiting, You Don't Know How It Feels, and Mary Jane's Last Dance.

His B-sides, such as Time to Move On, Square One, even the Losers, straight into darkness,

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