Watch Tom Petty Break Down "The Waiting": Exclusive Clip From "Runnin' Down a Dream"

Yesterday Rock Daily brought you the trailer from Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty documentary Runnin' Down a Dream — today we've got an exclusive clip. Watch Petty sit down with an acoustic guitar to explain how he wrote "The Waiting" (the chords were stuck in his head for a week), and check out the song's evolution via live footage, plus commentary from Eddie Vedder. "The girls I was going after when I was a kid, they just loved Tom Petty. Everything was Tom Petty, Tom Petty, Tom Petty," the Pearl Jam frontman says.

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Song Stories

“The A Team”

Ed Sheeran | 2011

This debut track from the then-20-year-old British singer-songwriter has a dark story behind it. Sheeran says he culls songwriting inspiration from "viewing other people's situations," which, for the heroine in "The A Team," involves drug addiction and prostitution that began as a teen. Sheeran paints the woman's trials with haunting imagery such as "But lately her face seems/Slowly sinking, wasting/Crumbling like pastries." "I did a gig at a homeless shelter, [and the song] is about one of the women there. It's her story," he said.

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