Confessions of a Fanboy

All right, time now for a third installment of our look back at Tom Petty & The Heartbreaker’s 1999 album Echo.  Today we examine the undisputed masterpiece of the album, the album’s title track “Echo.”
Now I’m not the first person to draw a line between Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.  Petty has taken his share [...]

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I have a lot of topics out there I need to get to around here and I just haven’t had the time to explore them all in the depth and at the speed with which I’d like.  I want to continue re-visiting Tom Petty’s Echo.  I also want to continue with the Pink Floyd discussion [...]

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Fits and starts, victory and retreat.  That has been my progress on this miniseries about Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ 1999 album Echo.
I started the third entry in the series (here are the first two: “Swingin’” and “Room At The Top“) today when I decided I absolutely had to have two reference guides with me [...]

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It started quite by accident, but I rediscovered Tom Petty’s 1999 album Echo earlier this week and after getting a little discussion with a couple readers thought it might be fun to revisit a few more songs from that record.
I tried finding the review of Echo I wrote for my campus newspaper when the album [...]

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I was about to listen to Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ “Walls” yesterday when I stumbled across another old favorite.
Tom Petty’s “Last Action Hero” is a hard livin’, hard luck woman who’s going down “Swingin’.”  We’re not sure what our heroine is fleeing, but she’s making a run for it.  She’s fleeing unknown circumstances, but [...]

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It’s a good thing I got so much writing done yesterday because I’ve gotten fuck all done today.
The phrase of the day comes from one Michael Stipe:  “Death is pretty final, I’m collecting vinyl.”
After all the cajoling, nagging, and prodding from one Mr. Mark Saleski, I’ve finally taken the plunge and ordered a turntable.  That’s [...]

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I’m not very bright.
How is it I didn’t hear Hurricane Katrina in the lyrics of “Orphan of The Storm?” Tom Petty isn’t even being all that clever or clandestine? It’s fuckin’ obvious but it didn’t hit me until this morning when I woke up with that song in my head. I’m a [...]

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Just a quickie: I unexpectedly wrote a review of Johnny Young’s The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions last night. I ordered it from Amazon and planned to write something short about it for here but once I got started I couldn’t stop, so the review is over at BC Magazine.
I’ll be contributing to “Iguana” [...]

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It’s a Mudcrutch Monday here at Confessions of a Fanboy.
What’s that? It’s not Monday? Oh, right then. My mistake. Holiday weekends always do that to me. It’s amazing how quickly a Tuesday can become a Monday. So much for fuckin’ alliteration. I liked Mudcrutch Monday. It had [...]

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We’ll call today “Revenge of the Rickenbacker!” After spending the morning listening to R.E.M.’s Reckoning and a few other classics from their IRS years, I was craving more Rickenbacker rock. I was consumed with a desire to hear some of those bands that made that jangling, chiming guitar sound famous. To my [...]

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