Alexandra Wolfe, Tom Petty Won’t Back Down:

…On the afternoon we meet, he’s sitting on the couch with his dog, Ryder, a golden lab with a red bandana tied around his neck. Alternating between drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, he talks about how he’s gearing up for a reunion tour and new album with his first real band, Mudcrutch. The musician, known for hit songs such as “American Girl” (1976) and “Free Fallin’” (1989), hasn’t been on tour in two years, and it’s a departure from his usual band, the Heartbreakers. But for Mr. Petty, 65, reuniting with Mudcrutch is a kind of homecoming…

“I can’t stand to be bored,” he says. “I don’t cope with it—I’m not the best me I can be when I’m bored.” Over the years, he has immersed himself in his work to get through troubled times in his life.

Since childhood, he has listened to music as a way to escape. Mr. Petty says that his father, an Air Force veteran who worked as an insurance salesman, used to beat and verbally harass him. (His father died in 1999, and they never reconciled.) Going to therapy in the 1990s, he says, helped him to get through the anger and depression from his childhood. “I could really get mad easily, and it wasn’t attractive, and [after therapy] that went away for the most part, and I became somebody different.”

…He says that while the musical side of his life has gone well, “being a person is a challenge, but I think I’m a better one than I used to be.” He suffered through depression in the mid-1990s after divorcing his first wife and then again around 2001 when his close friend George Harrison died. [Read more…]