And Tom Petty is, well, Tom Petty. Put them together, and . . .
Q. There was a notion among some rock critics in the early '90s, before Nirvana, that everything that can be done with guitars, bass and drums has been done, and the future is all in synthesizers and sequencers. You've never subscribed to that theory.
A. I think that those people who went for the sequencers and the synthesizers at the time really dated themselves by doing that. We always saw them as not timeless instruments. We stay organic; if we want to make a synthesizer sound, we'll find some organic way to do it. Those computer instruments seem to date themselves, and if you look back at a lot of that music from the '80s, you almost kind of laugh at it. It's very much of an era, and I think the best songs are kind of timeless. They last a long time.
Q. You have songs that could have been recorded in 1967 or in 2007.
A. Yeah, and the nicest thing is that they still play our whole catalog. That's what I'm most proud of, I think.
Q. When you did something like "Don't Come Around Here No More," it sounds as if you were really having a field day in the studio, with gates and reverb on the drums and those strange echoes that come in and out. Was that kind of like "kid in a candy store" time?
A. Yeah, it was. I wanted to make a single that sounded like nothing anybody had ever done, and to this day, I don't know that anybody's ever made a single like that. We worked very hard on that song--maybe a month--and we were doing things like right in the middle, there's a big piano note, a grand piano, and we literally grabbed the tape and pulled it across the heads [of the recorder] so it makes this kind of "whoooooo" [laughs].
You can read the entire, wide-ranging interview here, and you'll be real glad that you did.
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