Since The Wire is gone forever, my Sunday night television schedule is completely vacant — sorry, Paul Giamatti in a wig wasn't enough to tempt me. Instead, I finally tore the plastic on Runnin' Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich's epic, two-DVD documentary covering the entire career of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Since it clocks in at four hours, I didn't get through the whole film, but halfway through the first disc, record producer-turned-executive Jimmy Iovine said something that caught my attention.

In his still-thick New Yawk accent, Iovine opines that an artist's third record is typically their strongest. To paraphrase him: A debut LP usually features compositions that the musicians has been tinkering with for a decade, so the songs are amazing, but the recording is raw and unpolished. The follow-up LP usually suffers because it's rushed and put together in less than a year, thus the famous sophomore slump. Then, with their career on the line, musicians works extra hard to make the third album be a keeper. Iovine's examples? Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Patti Smith's Easter, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes.

(more...)