Premium ContentClick on Premium Content on the Featured navigation bar for information.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tom Petty has grown up, but not too much.
The 59-year-old spent a year going through thousands of hours of live concert recordings covering Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' tours across three decades.
The result is “The Live Anthology” — not a greatest hits album but a multiple-disc set. There are no overdubs, and the notorious perfectionist can now see why his hard-driven mates were “a good little rock 'n' roll band.”
Q: Did you find anything that surprised you about yourself going through all that footage?
A: I was surprised that we were as good as we were. I really didn't listen to us when we were back in our 20s and starting out. It was a really good little rock 'n' roll band. I see why it caught on.
Q: What inspires your writing?
A: I always did really well in English in school. ... I like language. I like words. ... For the longest time, I think, everything I did I wrote the music, and the words just kind of flowed in at the same time. As time went by, I started to concentrate more and more on the lyric and try to make that better and better.
Q: Your videos are iconic. Did that come from your love of film?
A: I probably watch three or four movies a day. ... I love film. It wasn't hard to make something better than everyone else. ... I was amazed at just how bad MTV was. ... Terrible videos and terrible songs, and most people made them almost all the same. ... I thought, let's just get out of the box here and do something different.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
