Tom Petty's Last Dance

This is the longest amount of time that's ever elapsed between albums for you. What took so long?
You know, that didn't occur to me until recently. I don't know if I was just fed up with it all or what, but I didn't really feel compelled to run out and do another record. I thought, "I am going to take my time." Then someone told me the other day that it's been three years.

It's actually been four years.
Has it been? Four years? That's a long time. I am surprised that I waited that long. But I honestly didn't even notice the time going by. And it didn't take long to make the record, just a few months. I guess I was touring and I took my time writing.

The songs on the album all seem to have similar themes about drifting lost in the world and looking for something solid to hold on to.
What is that song? It's got the line "It's hard to say who you are these days, but you run on anyway, don't you?" ["Saving Grace"] And that's kind of how I see these times. There are a lot of people who aren't sure who they are anymore, so they're just trying to keep their head above water because things are moving really fast these days. There is a lot of information flying around and a lot of people staring into their palms. [Pause] I don't know why I took so long [to make this album]. That really staggers me that it took so long.

It seems like you have made a comfortable life for yourself with your family in Malibu, but when I heard the record, I heard loneliness. Where does that come from?
It wouldn't have been a very good record if I just sat back and wrote about how happy I was. But I am pretty happy these days. I've gone through the dark tunnel and come out the other end in a lot of ways. I have a good family, my kids are doing well, and I have a young boy who just turned thirteen, and that's a whole movie on its own. I never really had any real family. My mom died when I was quite young, and my dad was never around much. And so when I married Dana, she and her mom and her brother lived down here, and they kind of adopted me into their family. Actually, her mom is one of my main assistants. She runs the whole estate. So I feel good having that kind of bond with a family.

I remember just before you moved out here, people were worried about you because you had split up with your wife and were living in a shack somewhere.
Yeah, I was living in a pretty rundown shack. I didn't mind it. It was in a part of the Pacific Palisades, in the woods. And I was living back there and had chickens and all kinds of shit. In some places, you could actually see the daylight coming through the walls of the cabin. But it was my bachelor pad, you know. I had a big adjustment to make, and maybe they were right to be worried about me. I had a lot of free time in that period, and it wasn't the best period in my life. But I am through that. I came out the good side.

What was the wake-up call that made you clean up?
Oh, yeah, well, you know, it was "One of us is dead." It's like, "Shit." Yeah, that's a big wake-up call. I've lived life pretty hard, I took an adult portion of life and squeezed it into a very short amount of time when I was younger. We lived hard, we didn't sleep much, we traveled all the time. In this job, you don't realize that you're getting older. Then probably around the time I got married again, I said, "I am going to try and act my age now." I am still coming to terms with it a little bit, but it's not bad.

The thing that's tough about it is you realize you have a limited amount of time left. That's the first time that ever dawned on me: "Oh, shit, you're going to run out of time." That's one of the reasons I don't want to spend the rest of my life touring -- I have done it. You can do that and then look up one day, and a lot of your life has gone by, and all you did was go around doing rock & roll shows.