![]() I don’t even know what song we’re doing!' 'Okay, here we go.' 'No, that doesn’t sound good.' 'Okay, let’s get a good night’s sleep and come back tomorrow.' 'Now the sounds have changed, we’ve got to work on the sound some more.' It was one of those kinds of records. "Tom played my Strat because he didn’t really have an electric guitar at the time per se, and we just worked and worked and worked and moved amps and microphones around until Jimmy said, 'Okay, let’s record now.' 'Wait, I’m burned out. I think our songwriting is what kind of kept us going all these years And that’s mostly what we used on the record. You know, I had a Goldtop and a Broadcaster and a Strat. "There were some 12-strings here and there, a couple of Gibsons, but we didn’t have that many guitars at the time. And I think we ended up using a Marshall on a lot of the record, and I had a Broadcaster, my original Fender Broadcaster that I used on Here Comes My Girl and Even the Losers. And we were going through and plugging in the Marshall, plugging in the Fender, plugging in whatever they had out there. "It would have been… At one time I remember Shelly had put every amp known to man side by side, like 15 of them. ![]() "That’s the only time I ever walked out of a session like, 'I can’t take it!' That’s how hard it was, but it was worth it. I just said, 'I can’t take this,' you know, 'This is just painful,' and I left town for a few days and cleared my head out and came back and we eventually found a take that was good and finished that one. It went 50 takes, 80 takes, and I finally just walked out of the studio one day. We wanted to make that one especially good and we were just having trouble getting the sound or the groove. He pushed us he pushed us with the songs he pushed us getting the sounds right. I don’t think I’d ever want to make a record that difficult again. It’s an amazing-sounding record and I’m really proud of it when I hear it now. "We were determined to make the best-sounding record ever made, and in a lot of ways I think we succeeded. It went 50 takes, 80 takes, and I finally just walked out of the studio one day We spent weeks on songs - and days on a snare sound. "So we go in the studio with these aspirations of making this big-sounding record, and it took us a while to translate what we were doing in the room into the studio to make that sound. We didn't get pigeonholed into a genre or a fad the songs hold up to me and still sound true.(Image credit: Richard E. And I think the songs are not in any kind of genre-it's not New Wave or grunge or whatever, it's just rock 'n' roll done really well. Hopefully, that's the beauty of good music. “Which I don't agree with, but when I hear them on the radio now, I'm really proud of the recording and the songcraft and the timelessness. “In fact, he said, ‘I don't need to hear any more songs, we've got the two we need, the rest doesn't matter,'” recalls Campbell. It was the embryonic demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl” that made Iovine so excited about producing the album to begin with, and so confident of the band’s impending megastardom. I wrote the music pretty much as the record stands and gave those tapes to Tom, and he wrote these incredible words and made the songs what they are.” We'd written a lot of songs before, but that one just had some magic. Just watch that one go.’ ‘Refugee’ is one of the first songs that Tom and I wrote that really, really was huge. They were going, ‘You guys have done it now. “I remember even everybody in the room, like the whole crew, staff, and the girl at the front desk all came in. The nitpicker-in-chief was producer Jimmy Iovine, who made the band work and rework songs over and over-Campbell claims they may have spent two weeks on the snare sound for “Refugee” alone, but the result was a breakthrough hit from the moment the final version was played back in the studio. And that's why it sounds so pristine, but it wasn't fun.” We went through a lot of tuning the drums endlessly, trying different guitars and amps-getting so nitpicky about every little nuance of the sound. “We didn't have our studio chops, and that was very frustrating because we kept thinking we had it. “It was not an easy record to make, but it paid off 'cause it came out and it really has an amazing sound and it jumps out of the radio when you hear it,” Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell tells Apple Music. In between, he and his band were put through the wringer by a producer who would go on to become a mogul, determined to spin Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ bar-band charm and penchant for classic hooks into platinum. Six months after, he was one of the biggest rock stars in America thanks to a handful of radio staples that would prove as enduring as any ever written. Six months before he released his third album, Tom Petty filed for bankruptcy.
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