Mike Campbell of Mike Campbell and The Dirty Knobs joins Backberry Smoke onstage at Synovus Bank Amphitheater at Chastain Park on August 09, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Few people can deliver a stop-you-in-your-tracks rock ’n’ roll song like Mike Campbell.
Campbell’s been on the front lines of history-making music for five decades — and counting. As a founding member of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band The Heartbreakers, he served as Tom Petty’s consigliere, co-writing “Refugee,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” “You Wreck Me” and other timeless hits in the group’s robust catalog. He once toured with Fleetwood Mac, stepping in for Lindsey Buckingham on a globetrotting arena tour. And he wrote the riffs for Don Henley song “The Boys of Summer,” one of the most enduring songs of its time.
With his knack for songwriting and showmanship, it should come as little surprise that Campbell’s new album pulls no punches. Called Mission of Mercy, he and his trusted band The Dirty Knobs debuted the 12-song effort earlier this month.
“Mission of Mercy is our fourth album and I think it’s our best,” Campbell told Forbes, referring to his work with The Dirty Knobs. The band released its debut album, Wreckless Abandon, in 2020, three years after The Heartbreakers ended following Petty’s death. Mission of Mercy follows 2024 album Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits and the 2022 release External Combustion.
Campbell continued, “I like to record with a live, kinetic energy, opposed to building things up. There’s plenty of rock and boogie and this-and-that, but there’s also songs that are slightly out of the rock genre. It’s got a little bit of everything.”
On ‘Mission Of Mercy’
Listeners hear Campbell’s so-called “little bit of everything” throughout the album, including on vintage heartland rock opener “No Regrets,” the hypnotic earworm “I Remember” and bluesy, big-riffed number “Wrecking Ball.”
At one moment, he offers riffs that could soundtrack the apocalypse — like on the ominous number “Armageddon” — and at other times, he’s reciting spoken-word rumination to a background of jazz-inspired playing, such as on the album-closing number “Vagrant.”
“Vagrant” started as a warm-up song that Campbell never intended for the album, he said.
“I was writing these sketches of a guy, a vagrant who’s lost in the city,” he said. “I had these lyrics that — I didn’t spend a lot of time on it — it’s mostly stream of consciousness. I came into the studio and I said, ‘I’ve got these words. How about we just put a couple of chords underneath it?’ … I was thinking of Tom Waits or Frank Zappa.”
He continued, “As the album was taking shape, somebody brought that track up again. I listened to it and was like, ‘There’s something cool about this.’ The beatnik poetry of it. The energy and the sound effects and the mood.”
Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs at The GRAMMY Museum on April 18, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
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Collaborators on Mission of Mercy include B-52s founding member Kate Pierson on the rip-roaring “Bongo Mania,” and Morgane Stapleton — Chris Stapleton’s wife and notable singer in his band — for the campfire country-western tune “More Than Gold.”
Campbell approached writing this throwback country-folk number the same way he tackles most songs — by waking up in the morning, grabbing a guitar and seeing what happens. In the chorus, Campbell and Morgane Stapleton sing, “’I’ll give it my best shot and open up my soul/ Maybe you’ll listen, maybe not/ But I need to fill this hole with more than gold.”
“I was thinking of an old Conway Twitty or some old country singer like Hank Williams and I thought I’d go into that world,” Campbell said. “The chords came quick and I had these words that were very simple but they were pretty strong. It’s a good message. It’s about filling your soul with more than money.”
‘Follow The Dream’
Later this year, the band plays AmericanaFest in Nashville, an annual gathering of some of the foremost artists in roots music. If the Heartbreakers debuted today, would the band be considered Americana — a catch-all phrase for songs that embrace influences from roots-rock, blues, soul, folk and country music?
Whether the music’s called Americana, heartland rock or something else, that’s not a question for Campbell to answer, he said.
Mike Campbell and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ‘Long After Dark’ tour, 7 December 1982 Wembley Arena.
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“We are from the heartland of the South, The Heartbreakers. We grew up in the South. We listened to country music and rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “I guess that could be considered the middle of the American culture. We represent that, like it or not. Tom’s songs, his lyrics tended to be about … not about rich people or poor people, per se. People in the middle and the struggles about being in America and trying to follow the dream.”
Still, no matter what it’s called, Campbell knows what it takes to write a timeless song.
“You may be going through a lot of dark s*** but at the end of the day there’s hope [that] everything’s gonna work out. I like songs that do that,” Campbell said. “Songs that leave you with a sense of inspiration and redemption.”
He added, “I instinctively tend to write that way. The characters that come to me are those types of characters and those types of stories. I guess that’s just in my DNA.”
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