Jakob Dylan

Jakob Dylan on Echo in the Canyon: 'Some people shine bright quickly and changed the landscape forever'

• "In my mind it was the weather, the girls, the surfing, the cars,” said Florida-born Tom Petty, in his last filmed interview before his death in 2017, of the appeal of the other sunshine state on the west side of the country. “This is where people that really were big dreamers went, because that’s kind of allowed here.”California dreamin’ was a popular pastime well before The Mamas and the Papas sang about it in 1965, of course. But when they put those words to such gleaming, longing, purely harmonised music, they helped to crystallise a sound that has been a shorthand for American escapism ever since.