TOM PETTY & The HEARTBREAKERS: LESS IS MORE, MORE OR LESS

“She hit me, Daddy!”

“I did not.”

The two Petty girls are having a little disagreement somewhere on the grounds of the family estate. It’s a sprawling but unpretentious spread nestled in the hills of Encino, California—a section known to Petty and his bandmember/neighbors as “Gainesville West,” in reference to their common point of origin in northern Florida. The girls appear over the rise, and the older one, embarrassed when she sees that her father has company, says, “Sorry, Dad.”

The sibling squabble fails to put a damper on Petty’s sunny disposition on this balmy spring afternoon. He’s tanned and relaxed, looking more like the blond rock star of the late ’70s than the sallow studio rat he became from ’83 to ’85 as he worked on the grueling Southern Accents project. That experience resulted in a broken hand and a nearly broken-up band for Petty. While he toiled endlessly in his home studio, the four Heartbreakers—guitarist Mike Campbell, keys player Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Howie Epstein—scattered far and wide in search of the musical action they weren’t getting at home.