The first time I heard this song was during the 2020 Tom Petty's 70th birthday virtual concert. Two things were striking for me. The first was how much the voice of Mike Campbell resembles that of Tom Petty and the second how simple yet beautiful sounding this song is.

Vocals

I worked with my vocal coach on this song. We went through several iterations, vowel pronunciation techniques, interval practice to be able to hit the right notes. Also finding the right phrasing especially in the word dense chorus took a while to figure out and keep consistent.

My mentor also recommended me to double track at least some parts of the vocals. We agreed to do that in the chorus and it also sounded impactful to do in the final verse, helped by the fact that I had two takes with very similar phrasing.

Rhythm guitar

This fingerstyle pattern was new to me and the major challenge was to keep the finger motions consistent across the track. Luckily my 19 year old tomcat was there to assist.

Lead guitar

I kept this also fingerstyle. There are two fills in the second verse, a solo and an outro. I could not find any guitar sheets with them so I tried replicating what I was hearing and improvising when in doubt. To make things simpler I recorded each section individually with multiple takes until I got acceptable results. It would have been nice if I hadn't forgotten to turn on the 3 photo lights and get a better picture quality.

Acoustic rhythm guitar

The open string/cowboy chords are simple but my focus was on consistency and constant rhythm. I recorded the performance with both the piezo pickup and a microphone, each panned hard to left and right in the mix, in the hope of improving the acoustic tone but frankly I'm not that convinced.

Bass

The bare minimum bass line with just the root notes seemed a good fit. For the chorus I'm moving up the neck to change the strings and thus the timbre of the root notes.

Keyboard - rock organ

I was ready to finish the mixing and mastering but I realized that there's no sound gluing everything together. Listening more closely to the remastered studio version made me realize the presence of a mix of organ and strings so I tried to replicate the feel of it.

Drums

Towards the end of the recording process I also realized that the discrete drumline. It's not an exact replica but I tried to keep it subdued and in rhythm.