Stan Lynch’s New Tom Petty Song Asks ‘What’s It Like In That Soft Clean Air?’

The former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drummer has turned years of private feelings about his friend and bandmate into “High Flying Bird”, a new song recorded with Speaker Wars.

by Paul Cashmere

Stan Lynch has written a song for Tom Petty, but “High Flying Bird” is less a conventional tribute than a conversation with a friend who is no longer here to answer. Recorded with Lynch’s current band The Speaker Wars, the new song looks upwards, asking Petty what he can see from wherever he is now and imagining whether he might still be making music.

“What do you see from way up there / What’s it like in that soft clean air?” Lynch sings at the beginning of the song, setting the tone for a deeply personal piece that is reflective without becoming mournful.

The song becomes more direct as it unfolds. “I know you’re out there flying round / Hidden in the broken clouds / Will you be singing when it’s my turn,” Lynch sings, before returning to the repeated image of the “high flying bird”.

Lynch wrote the song himself, with 100 per cent of the songwriting credit, and also plays the instrumentation. Jon Christopher Davis provides background vocals, Drew Taubenfeld plays slide guitar, Stan produced the recording, Rob Jacobs mixed it and Jeff Lowes and Mike Pisterzi mastered it at OTR Mastering. Mike Pisterzi is also credited as executive producer.

The timing gives “High Flying Bird” another layer. The song is being released as attention turns to the 50th anniversary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but Lynch says the song itself did not begin as a planned anniversary statement.

He told Noise11 that he had been carrying the song for years.

“I had started years ago that was evoking my feelings towards Tom, but that’s such a touchy, personal thing,” Lynch said. “I wasn’t sure I would ever want to put out a song with that kind of through-line.”

Watch the Noise11 interview with Stan Lynch:

That changed when Lynch began looking through old photographs and home movies from his Heartbreakers years. The material prompted him to reconsider the song and what it meant to him.

“I was writing it for me,” Lynch explained. “I wanted to hear myself, how do I feel about a brother I lost? It came off my skin organically.”

That description is important to understanding “High Flying Bird”. Lynch is not attempting to recreate a Heartbreakers song or write a conventional memorial. Instead, he is using the language of a conversation, asking questions that cannot be answered and leaving space around the loss.

The connection between the two musicians goes back to the beginning of the Heartbreakers. Lynch was the band’s original drummer and remained with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for roughly two decades, experiencing the transition from a struggling young band to one of the defining American rock groups of its era.

His departure came after the Heartbreakers’ performance at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in October 1994. Looking back at that period in his Noise11 interview, Lynch said the separation was already underway and that he ultimately believed his time with the band had run its course.

“My time, my tenure with the Heartbreakers was great,” he said. “I got to do 20 years. It was glorious.”

Lynch subsequently built another career as a songwriter, producer and musician, including extensive work with Don Henley and the Eagles. He has also continued performing, including a stint with Mike Campbell’s Dirty Knobs, reconnecting him with another important part of his Heartbreakers history.

For Lynch, however, the history is inseparable from Petty. At the Heartbreakers’ 2002 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Lynch had one of his final opportunities to speak with Petty. He told Noise11 that Petty and keyboard player Benmont Tench were among the people who had been particularly important in his life.

He also described what is missing when the surviving Heartbreakers perform without Petty.

“There’s a huge hole in the donut with Tom not being there,” Lynch said, describing the absence as musical, cosmic and spiritual. For a drummer, he explained, Petty’s rhythm guitar playing and physical movement were fundamental reference points.

That history gives “High Flying Bird” its weight. The song does not attempt to resolve Lynch’s feelings about losing his former bandmate. Instead, it leaves Petty somewhere beyond the clouds, still imagined as a musician, while Lynch remains on earth asking questions.

And the final question is perhaps the most personal: “Will you be singing when it’s my turn?” It turns a song about remembering Tom Petty into something broader about friendship, mortality and the people whose music remains part of us after they are gone.

Watch the Noise11 Speaker Wars interview with Jon Christopher Davis: