Tom Petty Quotes

When I grew up, there was one music: rock n' roll. Somewhere along the line, there was a separation. I don't know why it happened, but it did happen.

Guitar music or rock n' roll or whatever you want to call it sort of goes away with trends, but it'll never go away completely. It can't die because it's so fundamentally attractive.

A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.

There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself.

Hard rock will always be hard rock, but you don't really know what is rock - and what isn't - anymore. I don't consider a lot of the pop things I hear on the radio to be rock n' roll. It's just kind of fragmented.

One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene.

If you got in my truck, you were listening to country music, and that's the way it was for a long time. I'm a little more open to other sources of music now, a lot more. But for the formative years, I was just very into country.

To me, rock n' roll is rock n' roll. I try to think of it as that. To me, Funkadelic and Metallica exist in the same world.

To me, the sax is rock n' roll, even though electric guitars kind of pushed it aside for a while.

I have a soft spot for 'Wind of Change' because it was my first one, and it was a departure from Humble Pie - very much so. It showed me the spectrum of what I could do.

I grew up listening to everything. I was in rock n' roll bands and punk bands, and I loved bluegrass and country music, too. Then, when I moved to Nashville, I put out a very traditional country record because that's just what you do. I had a bunch of very traditional country songs. Next thing you know, you're a country singer.

My mum and dad used to listen to a lot of R&B and soul, so this was the way I grew up. Hip-hop, of course. But then as I grew older, I started listening to everything.

People from the rock and roll world have felt for years that electronic music had no soul, but now electronic music can not only have soul but have all the shapes in the world.

I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff, Motown and Stooges. But also early rock-and-roll like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. I feel like as I grew older, I've been working with different musicians, people that have are constantly showing me different things.

I started out in rock, but I didn't want to stay there, and haven't.

Actually, I didn't listen to country music very much in Oklahoma. I listened to blues and rock n' roll.

Music is constantly developing and changing.

I feel like it's a necessary part of musical development to go through that phase where you think that your favorite style of music is the only style of music, and I thought that for a while.

If you stick with one sound and one way of working, how will you ever progress?

I'm not a big country guy even though I'm from Nashville. I like some songs, but I wouldn't turn on a country radio station or anything.

I grew up listening pretty much just to pop music. But the older I've gotten, the more varied my musical tastes have become.

As the years go by, I realize how unique a style rock music is and how delicate you have to be with it sometimes; otherwise, you turn it into pop music or progressive rock or something else.

We all like all of that, from 'Rubber Soul' to 'The White Album' and all of that, but even before, we were into that theatrical element of things. We didn't want to do a 'Sgt. Pepper's' thing.

I don't think a song should be put in a category.

I think that young people should embrace artists like Lemmy from Motorhead but also be open to different styles.