I found this wonderful band in the seventh grade. As cliche as it is, Free Falling was the first song that sparked my interest. It was a guilty pleasure for the time, and I was kicking my own butt for liking it because I was very deep into my school's punk scene... After hearing Free Falling, I bought Full Moon Fever, little did I realize that Petty had much more to offer than just this brilliant album. By eighth grade my mind began to open a bit more, and same with the rest of my circle of friends, one of them actually made me a copy of their Wildflowers CD... I still had no idea what I would be getting myself into two years later.... the rest of eighth grade passed, I was still just playing FMF and WF thinking that was the extent of the Tom Petty catalog... ninth grade came around, I downloaded the greatest hits and American Girl hit me... because of some of my activities that year my memory is not so clear as to some of the events, and was certainly not clear at the time, I completely forgot about how much I liked just the greatest hits album.... Well, the summer of ninth going into tenth grade rolled around, I heard Listen To Her Heart, I'd never, ever, ever felt a song give me that feeling before....I hope you all know this intense mental eargasm.....
.... I had started the beginning to my still forming record collection.... I bought Damn The Torpedoes........ MY F***ING GOD!!!!... this was the beginning of what would become a brilliant musical journey....
Dramatic enough for you, basically it took me a while, but I now own Tom Petty's discography digitally, 3 albums on vinyl, and 3 on CD... and I will have all of the albums hard copies as soon as I get to the record store