Throughout the past fifteen or so years of my life, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers have consistently enthralled and inspired me and my own creative endeavors. Even before knowing much of the band's own history, Petty always came across to me as the genuine article. For all the band's success and MTV exposure, he never seemed to me a guy who would compromise his artistic vision or take any shit from anyone. When Miranda and I became friends and started dating several years ago, the music of Petty and the Heartbreakers often played on the car stereo and always showed up multiple times on mix tapes. The summer after we started dating, we celebrated my birthday under the stars at Deer Creek Music Center enjoying Petty and company along with the incomparable Lucinda Williams.This Christmas, santa brought us a copy of the new Peter Bogdanovich film, Runnin' Down a Dream, which I've been dying to see since its release back in October. Over two nights, Miranda and I sat down and watched this detailed four hour film tracing the inception and the history of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Since finishing the film, I've been revisiting all of the Petty albums which we have collected in our home with an invigorated and deepened admiration for the man and his music. The song Miranda and I have listened to over and over and over again can be found as a lost track in the 1995 box set Playback. The song is featured during a studio take in one of my favorite parts of the Bogdanovich film. The title of the song is "Keeping Me Alive" and was actually cut from the Long After Dark sessions. In the film, Petty admits that fighting producer Jimmy Iovine for the addition of this track and a few other acoustic based songs would have made the album stronger, to which Iovine replies "Yeah, after the third album you should probably shoot your producer." Maybe this song was just too incredible to be included on an album. It stands on its own as proof of Tom Petty as one of the truly great american songwriters.
