As beautifully as they performed it, Afro-Blue's take on Tom Petty's "American Girl" on last night's The Sing-Off was misguided from the start.
The group's intro video reminded us that the judges have called out the Howard group repeatedly for overcomplicating their arrangements. But from the moment they began their rock submission (for "Rock and Country [...]

Don't Do Me Like That: On the one hand, you've got to sympathize with artists like Tom Petty, whose music has been borrowed by the campaigns of George W. Bush and now Michelle Bachmann. He's asked Bachmann not to use "American Girl," but because her campaign has been playing it at public events, he likely [...]

I'm totally stating the obvious here, but Tom Petty has a lot of good songs.
At the very beginning of Peter Bogdanovich's mammoth 4-hour Petty documentary Runnin' Down a Dream Rick Rubin shows up as a talking head saying "It's really mind numbing how many great songs they have." I thought that this was kind [...]