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.

Extatic 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. His grandfather worked in a logging camp and was affectionately known as Pulpwood. 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 Mudcrutch,

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.

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