A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Into The Great Wide Open by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Abraham Lincoln once said (to a delegation from the National Union League who were urging him to be their presidential candidate) that, “It is never wise to swap horses in mid-stream” and, after the popular breakthrough that his solo album made in 1989, Tom Petty clearly took that adage to heart when it came time to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Twelve years after they started, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers found themselves in a fairly unique position in pop music: they’ve been working long enough and had been influential enough that radio waves were beginning to get crowded which artists who cited the band as an influence – or at least seemed like it. On...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of the Pack Up The Plantation: Live! 2LP set by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It’s far a far less common occurrence now (when virtually every band in the universe releases a live album and, thanks to digital technology,is able to “fix” every flaw in the show in post-production) but, at one time, the release of a live album meant that the band in question was confident enough...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Southern Accents by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Throughout music history, many albums have been made which it is said are conflicted due to tensions apparent within the band Acoming out in the music. Some of those albums turn out to be phenomenal – there was conflict brewing in Nirvana and it came out in In Utero and it was great as were the cases with End...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of the Long After Dark LP by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. In the first half-decade of their association together, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had already hit some pretty spectacular highs and lows on a condensed timeline. Virtually from day one, the group established that they had some great potential to write hits (see “American Girl,” “Here Comes My Girl” and “Rufugee” as easy and fantastic examples),...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Hard Promises by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When it comes to making a follow-up for a career-defining release, the catch is that whatever comes can often feel like a diminished return no matter how good it might be because the new music simply does not have the same spark which ignited the breakthrough of the previous album. It’s kind of heartbreaking to concede that possibility, but...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Damn The Torpedoes by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It might sound like a grandiose claim to say something like, “Truly and genuinely rare is an album like Damn The Torpedoes – it has really introduced some of the biggest and most respected institutions in the modern music industry” but those who think so simply do not know the whole story of the album. First, it’s important...