Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Thu 8 October 2026 20:15, UK
There’s an unmistakable sense around the Traveling Wilburys project that Tom Petty, George Harrison and others were having loads of fun.
How could they not? According to 2011’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the former Beatle essentially set one simple test for his supergroup membership: “who you could hang out with”. A chance to hang out with his mates and jam in the studio pulled in ELO’s Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and rockabilly crooner Roy Orbison, who all adopted Wilbury monikers as part of the tongue-in-cheek fictional family troupe.
It was a supergroup line-up that rivalled Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. All were enjoying something of a career uptick aside from Dylan, who was in a creative trough and had yet to release the acclaimed Oh Mercy.
The jovial rapport of the gang played out in the studio, cutting 1988’s Traveling Wilburys Vol 1 at Harrison’s home studio and Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart’s recording facility in Los Angeles, reportedly commencing sessions around midday with a loose exchange of mutual riffs and lyric ideas, building the tracks together before rounding off the day listening to Orbison’s tales of his Sun Records years.
Such studio holidaying appeared to be cut short, however, when Orbison suddenly died later that year. Trooping on, the now-four-piece adopted new pseudonyms and cut the confusingly titled Traveling Wilburys Vol 3 for another blast of supergroup hanging out. It would be their last, the Traveling Wilburys lapsing into dormancy indefinitely, but one song from their farewell LP remained in Petty’s affections for many years.
“My favourite Traveling Wilburys song is probably ‘End Of the Line’, but there was an obscure one Jeff and I did, called ‘Poor House’ on the second record,” Petty told Sound + Vision in 2013. “That was one I wrote about ten minutes after the session had ended and everyone was leaving.”
He added, “The engineer, Richard Dodd, was like, ‘Hey, everybody wait; we’re gonna do this really quick.’ We laid the track down, and Jeff and I did it all in two-part harmony together on one mic, which people don’t do much any more. At that time, we sang together quite a bit, and we had gotten pretty good at harmonies. We just thought we’d go for it because there’s no fixing it up on one mic.”
Further reading: From The Vault
What was unleashed was the perfect embodiment of the Traveling Wilburys spirit. Set to a bluegrass twang and an affected Southern vocal drawl, ‘Poor House’ jumps into a comedic vignette of a financially battered divorcee lamenting an acrimonious split with his wife and all the cash she’s cheerfully taking with her. Whether sourced from a real experience is unclear, but it’s a country stomper that could only have come from the supergroup, a traded mirth or off-the-cuff quip quickly ballooning into a full-blown number.
All held together by Harrison’s electric guitar takes, ‘Poor House’ would flash a last hurrah for the Traveling Wilburys. The band never regrouped once Harrison died in 2001, and Petty followed in 2017.
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