Heartbreakers Drummer Stan Lynch Remembers His ‘North Star’ Tom Petty on ‘High Flying Bird’
Categoria: Musica
The sentimental new song and video is dedicated to Lynch's late musical cohort.
Por Billboard | 02/10/2026
As the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 50th anniversary commemoration gets into gear, original drummer Stan Lynch is adding his own tribute with “High Flying Bird,” a sentimental song and video dedicated to his late musical cohort. The song is something Lynch “started years ago,” while the video is comprised of photos and home movies he unearthed about a year ago and had an archivist catalog. “I didn’t really think about the whole 50th kerfuffle,” Lynch, 71 — who left the Heartbreakers after their Bridge School Benefit performance during October of 1994 in Mountain View, Calif. — tells Billboard via Zoom from his home studio near Gainesville, Fla., where he grew up. “I was just kind of condensing things — hundreds of Polaroids, lots of movies just from that era that I’d never seen before. “At the time I had this song I had started years ago that was evoking my feelings towards Tom, but that’s such a touchy, personal thing. I wasn’t sure I would ever want to put out a song with that kind of through-line. But then when I saw all the (archival material), I kind of went, ‘Hey….'” Coincidentally, Lynch was contacted around the same time by Petty’s eldest daughter Adria, who oversees her father’s legacy and archives and was in the process of putting together the upcoming Origins 1971-1978 box set (out Nov. 6). She invited Lynch to participate in the project and others she had planned. “I love that Adria has become my friend,” he says, “because when I was in the band she was a little girl. I re-meet her and she’s a woman and she’s doing all of this to keep (Heartbreakers) things together and keep finding music. And having her as a filter has been great. “I showed her the video, ‘Hey, would you like to see this?,’ and she immediately pinged me back and said, ‘It’s cool.’ When I got that, really, I was already done. Mission accomplished.” In the poetic, melodic “High Flying Bird” — recorded with members of Speaker Wars, one of his current bands — Lynch converses with Petty, asking “What do you see from way up there/What’s it like in that soft clean air?” And he certainly pulls some heartstrings later in the song when he sings, “I know you’re out there flying ’round/Hiding in the broken clouds/Will you be singing when it’s my turn?” “This is cleaning,” Lynch explains. “I was writing it for me. I wanted to hear myself, how do I feel about a brother I lost? It came off my skin organically. At this point in my life I follow my joy and my creativity, and I follow friendship. It was important for me to do something positive.” Despite the acrimony over his departure from the Heartbreakers 32 years ago, Lynch — who subsequently came back to good terms with all of his bandmat