Randall E. Auxier is a musician and also a professor of philosophy and communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of several books, including Metaphysical Graffiti (2017), and the editor or co-editor of many more, including Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy (with Douglas R. Anderson) (2008). Megan Volpert is a high school English teacher in the Fulton County Schools, Atlanta, Georgia. She is author of many books, including 1976, Little Rock (2016) and Only Ride, Little Rock (2014).

Foreword by Luke Dick
Editorial Note
Part I: UNCERTAINTY
1. Tom Petty Needed to Know (Don Fallis)
2. Time to Move On: Optimism and Action in the Face of Uncertainty (Ashley Watkins)
Part II: MAKING ART
3. Friedrich Nietzsche and Tom Petty in the Individual's Aesthetic Creation of Music-A tragedy (Chris Innes)
4. Echoes of Past and Present (Matthew Crippen)
5. "Free Fallin'": Tom Petty, Postmodernism, Post-Structuralism and Who We Are(n't) (John Sewell)
Part III: GIRL TROUBLE
6. She Went Down Swingin': Petty's View of Women (Megan Volpert)
7. Mary Jane's Revenge: Tom Petty and Death (Randall E. Auxier)
8. Insider Knowledge: A Lover's Delusion? (Mary Edwards)
Part IV: CORPORATE MACHINE
9. When Money Shouldn't be King: Petty on the Value of Music and the Ethics of the Music Industry (Brian Berkey)
10. Forever the Wild One: Tom Petty and His Drive for Artistic Freedom (S. Keller Anders)
11. Century City: On Collective and Corporate Intentionality (Raul Hakli)
Part V: HOW TO REBEL
12. "Blue-Bellied Devils": The Ethics of Self-Defense (Eric v.d. Luft)
13. Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll (Is Fine): On Authoritarianism and Permission (Megan Volpert)
Appendix: An After-death Interview with Tom Petty

For the first time, serious thinkers explore the work of this towering genius of rock music. For fans of Tom Petty, this volume is an eye-opener, with fourteen music-savvy philosophers looking at different facets of Petty's artistic contribution. They examine not only Tom Petty's thoughts but also the thoughts we have while we listen. The authors, all Petty fans, come from every philosophical viewpoint: classical, analytic, postmodernist, phenomenological, and Nietzschean.
Tom Petty's body of work exists on a continuum between Folk and Rock, between New Wave and Americana, between Southern simplicity and West Coast chic. There is the legacy left to his main backing band, the Heartbreakers, but also bookended by Mudcrutch and his collaborations with his elders, such as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash.
Tom Petty's songs hook and they captivate, but they are often profound in their understatement, their stark minimalism. His insight into the human condition conveys a powerful philosophical anthropology with a metaphysics of tragedy, gravity, and levity.
Tom Petty's ethics focuses on dilemmas of the outcast, downtrodden, and heartbroken with a view to the fallen and the sinful as our redeemable antiheroes of the everyday.
His political thinking is that of the artist, enlivened by Southern hostilities and Californian futilities, culminating in a personal ethic that puts duty to the fans first. Petty's theory of knowledge is psychological and interpersonal, both deeply meditative and delightfully skeptical. The dialectic of love and hate, abuse and recovery, poverty and power, triumph and loss provide the genuine objects of knowledge.
Above all, Petty's songs are the confessions of a poetic mind interpreting a wounded soul. Petty lived his life the way he wrote and the way he played. It was grit, drive, and just enough finesse, to make things nice, where they need to be nice. On stage, he put the schau in Anschauung.
Petty stood up to corporate assholes in a number of precedent-setting legal maneuvers and album concepts, risking his career and fortune, but never backing down. He was the center of a musical community that endured over four decades. His ability to cultivate new generations of listeners while connecting himself backward to the heroes of his own youth have made him universally respected by the widest range of music fans.