While building out artist and album pages, I’ve realized there are quite a few instances where I’m just an album or a song short of a complete set.

It might be a Deep Dive artist who put out an album after I did the Deep Dive. Or an album I’ve covered so extensively over the years that I’m just a song or two short of representing the whole tracklist.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to fill in some of those blanks.

I recently added a Tom Petty Deep Dive to the Artists page and discovered I haven’t written about just two studio albums across his 40-year career. In both cases, it’s the sophomore album he released with a side group (I’ll get to the other one next week).

Traveling Wilburys has been lauded as the starriest supergroup in music history. The pairing of Bob Dylan and Beatle George Harrison alone pretty much takes care of that. Add in rock legend Petty, iconic singer-songwriter Roy Orbison, and ELO founder Jeff Lynne and you’ve got a rock-n-roll Justice League.

The band’s first album, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, was an instant classic. The five men played off of each other beautifully, trading vocals and guitar parts on a song cycle brimming with charm and ingenuity.

Sadly, Orbison died two months after the album’s release (at just 52 years old!) and missed its triple-Platinum success.

The rest of the bandmates wanted to continue the collaboration, but Orbison’s passing and Dylan’s busy touring schedule made it difficult. Harrison, the band’s default leader, kept the fires burning until early 1990, when sessions for a follow-up album began.

It was also Harrison who suggested naming the sophomore release Vol. 3, just to confuse people. What a rascal.

Dylan laid down lead vocals for all of the tracks during a break in his tour, trusting Harrison (serving as producer) to use as much or as little as he wanted. Harrison didn’t want to scrap his friend’s work, so Dylan is a much more prominent vocalist on this album.

That’s not exactly a win, given Dylan’s limitations as a singer. And losing Orbison’s soaring vocals didn’t help, either (today’s SOTD is a good example of one that would have been improved by Orbison’s presence). But on the whole, Vol. 3 is a worthy successor to the first album.

This is a grittier and more biting record, with less of its predecessor’s easygoing charm. But the sense of humor is intact and the songwriting is sharp as ever. ‘If You Belonged To Me’ sounds like an outtake from a 70s Dylan album, while ‘Cool Dry Place’ would have been right at home on Petty’s Full Moon Fever. Opener ‘She’s My Baby’ chugs along like a runaway freight train and first single ‘Inside Out’ is the best climate change singalong ever written.

Vol. 3 went Platinum in the U.S. but couldn’t reach the heights of the band’s first album, which felt like lightning in a bottle. It’s a shame, because this is a great collection that is a credit to the careers of everyone involved.

Harrison’s death in 2001 put an end to any possibility of a third album, as he was the glue that kept the band together. We’ve since lost Petty as well, leaving Dylan (85) and Lynne (78) as the only living Wilburys.

🎵 Tom Petty Deep Dive 🎵
→ My exploration of Tom Petty’s catalog