Taylor Swift says that Tom Petty played an important role in her becoming a musician.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Swift said: “To me, Tom Petty represented a kind of songwriting I idolized: complex simplicity.”
She even went so far as to say that Petty’ was one of the reasons she learned to play guitar in the first place.
“It said so much in the lyrics, the concepts, the stories, the message, the nuances … but always brought you back to a hook that got stuck in everyone’s head. He motivated thousands of guitarists to learn to play just because they wanted to be able to play ‘Free Fallin.” Count me as one of them.”
Sift covered Petty’s song “American Girl” in 2009.
Petty suffered a cardiac arrest and died on Monday. He was 66.