Heartbreaker Mike Campbell's Poignant Song to Tom Petty

The new song, "State of Mind", by former Heartbreakers' lead guitarist and now solo artist Mike Campbell, and featuring vocals from Margo Price, is an ode to the late Tom Petty, a song freighted with Campbell's feelings for him, as heard early on in the lyrics: "And yooou left a hole in my heart / Big enough to drive a truck through". The way he and Price deliver that line is powerful and searing.

Overall it's a slow-rolling elegiac rocker, full of great warmth and beauty. The lyrics are simple yet gorgeously wistful, with Petty's Gainesville twang echoed in Campbell's pained voice and words, and Price adding leavening brightness and shimmer. From the jump it's the slow roll of the beat and the warm jangle of guitar that pull you in and tee you up, only to be bowled over by the eventual lyrical "truck driving through". Price takes the lead in the second verse when she sings, "Love is a state of grace / A state of grace". And midway through the song comes a surge of bright horns for the chorus: "Turn this train around / Turn this train around / Turn this train around right now / So I can go back home". In verse 3 they blend their voices again, intoning the sweet and warm audiovisual of "Faith is a rising sun / Is a rising sun". And the verse's last lines bring a poignant shift in the story, as if Campbell is now addressing a young child: "Dooo you believe that you can live forever? / Dooo you believe anything, my little one?" – a nod to everyone's eventual end and perhaps the artistic immortality of Petty's best music.

When Mike Campbell brought Margo Price into his studio to hear the song for the first time, tears started running down her face while listening, because she knew almost immediately who the song was about. As an American girl growing up at the crossroads of prairie and nowhere in rural Illinois in the 1990s, the airwaves of her adolescent days and nights had a lot of Tom Petty – she loved his music, it spoke strongly to her. And now working in the studio 25 years later, she was, in a way, returning a favor.

Margo Price will once again be part of the lineup at the annual Farm Aid music festival (I'll be there), held later this month, this time in North Carolina (Raleigh). Last year she became a member of the Farm Aid board, the only female music artist in that position, joining founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp, and also Dave Mathews. She's performed at the festival every year since 2016 (my first year there too), when she told the audience as she took the stage that her parents had lost their Illinois farm in the 1980s, during the American farm crisis, the impetus for Farm Aid's start in 1985, and now she was honored and thrilled to be able to help out.

Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and the rest of the Heartbreakers were at that first Farm Aid, and the second. And Fourth of July weekend that same year, 1986, was the one and only time that I saw that great band. They were backing Bob Dylan on the historic True Confessions Tour, and the Grateful Dead was added to the bill, and I saw them all at RFK Stadium in D.C. – part of an unforgettable gathering of over one-hundred thousand fans comprising a monumental mass of swirling human joy.

Now Petty is gone, and Campbell and Price remain, to sing this heartbreaking song of heartache and love. Love also remains.