Checking In, and Mourning Mr. Petty

Hi everyone. Hope you are all well. This is a very brief post to say thank you to everyone who has left comments and/or contacted me privately about my surgery in Montreal. Thank you all; it means a great deal. Big hugs to all of you! xoxoxo

I'll write more soon about my entire Montreal experience (hopefully tomorrow, in fact), but the headline is that I'm doing well overall. I'm back in the Boston area, slowly healing day by day. I have some minor discomfort, and get tired very easily. I've learned the hard way - repeatedly lol - not to push myself too far, too fast, and that has proved to be a wise decision. Again, I'll write more about it in my next post, but I'm playing it same and taking the long view.

I also want to mention how deeply saddened I was, and am, by the sudden death of Tom Petty on Monday. His music means a great deal to me; in fact, I read the excellent biography Warren Zanes wrote about him while I was in Montreal, specifically holding off on reading it for nearly a year so I could do so. I spent much of my time there, and this week, listening to his amazing catalogue and marveling at his consistency over a 40-year career.

Of all of his work - and he never made a bad album, or even a mediocre one, in his entire career - his 1981 album Hard Promises in particular means a great deal to me.

I was in high school when it came out, locked in an incredibly painful struggle with myself (even if I didn't fully understand its cause at the time), one that would take many years to resolve. I remember how comforting the entire album was, particularly the song "Insider."

He originally wrote it for Stevie Nicks when she requested a song for what became her debut album; when he played it for her, she told him she couldn't take it because it was clearly such an intensely personal song, but that she would be honored to sing it with him - which she did:

I've listened to "Insider" countless times over the years. It helped a lonely, confused, frightened 15-year-old realize that someone else understood how she felt and let her know that she, too, could crawl through the briars. That she, too, could persevere - that she could also be an Insider. Thank you for that, Tom. RIP.