Mary Jane's Last Dance guitar lesson
Tom Petty wrote this song in 1993. If you look at the original video is a bit of a bizarre journey. Tom plays a morgue's assistant and takes a corpse who is played by Kim Basinger. He dresses her up, makes dinner for her, they watch TV together, they dance, and all the time she is dead. At the end she opens her eyes.

The words seem to have drug overtones but Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell said, “...when it gets to the chorus he had the presence of mind to give it a deeper meaning. My take on it is it can be whatever you want it to be. A lot of people think it's a drug reference, and if that's what you want to think, it very well could be, but it could also just be a goodbye love song."

I love songs that have no clear message and the listener can imagine whatever they want the song to be.

The chords are simple. Am, G, D, Em, A - all open position chords. But then we can use half barre chords up the neck all the way to the 12th fret in some parts.

The use of hammer-on chords are tricky and so this song is a good exercise in  working with those on the open G and D chords.

In the lead section there is a signature double stop riff that just can't be left out but most of the intricate guitar work in the original recording I skipped over making my own arrangement instead. This song has many layers as a band arrangement but you have to simplify when playing solo. 

I did use a looper during the solo section so that you can hear the main chord progression in the background while the double stop riff and lead is playing. 

There is also a backing track starting at 17:31 until 19:05 just in case you want to practice the lead section yourself.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Hal
https://youtu.be/hv9GP57Zdpc

Mary Jane's Last Dance - Tom Petty
Yesterday during a lesson I realized that I hadn't taught this Tom Petty song yet. My student is a big fan so I thought that I'd add another one to the repertoire. Both this song, and Free Fallin’, will go in the book soon.

During the filming of the guitar lesson the audio recorder went off so I'll have to over dub the speaking on the zoomed in shots. Not sure I can get that out in a day. We'll see.

There is a lot going on in the original version of Mary Jane's Last Dance so we have to pick and choose what we are going to play when playing solo and singing. I really like making my own arrangements of a song.

During the filming I'm using a looper to record the background guitar parts so that I can solo over that later. At 11 seconds you can see me look down at the floor and that's when I start the looper. I can't remember if it was at 16 or 21 seconds when I stopped recording the loop. It was either one chord progression or two.

What do you think about the arrangement?

Hal

https://youtu.be/nnsIp5Ee0cI