Tom Petty Says “I Won’t Back Down”

What's the story behind Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down"?

Tom Petty sings the line:

I’ll stand my ground / And I won’t back down.

Did you you know he's talking about the arsonist that set his house on fire?  With him and his family inside eating breakfast?  It happened 25 years ago in his Encino, California home.  He got his family out safely and went back to try to fight it with a garden hose.  That didn't work out too well.

“We were shaken for years by it,” Petty admitted in Paul Zollo’s 2005 book ‘Conversations with Tom Petty.’ “It’s sort of like being raped, I would imagine. It really took a long time. And it was 10 times as bad, because you knew that somebody just went and did it. Somebody tried to off you.”

Check out the full story here.