He formed The Heartbreakers in 1976, and their self-titled debut album was released the same year. It featured Petty’s classic song ‘American Girl’. Petty’s breakthrough came with his band’s third album ‘Damn the Torpedoes’ in 1979. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers last released an album in 2014 in the form of 13th LP ‘Hypnotic Eye’. UCR 
"George Harrison had not released a new album since 1982’s commercially unsuccessful Gone Troppo, when he approached Electric Light Orchestra multi-instrumentalist Jeff Lynne in late 1986 about collaborating on new music.
Lynne, who had self-produced or coproduced most of his own releases and had coproduced two albums for Dave Edmunds had long been alternately praised and criticized for creating music in the tradition of the Beatles...
...But in Lynne, Harrison had met something of a kindred spirit who understood and appreciated Harrison’s musical influences and sensibilities and, perhaps more importantly, his humor.
Released in November 1987, Cloud Nine became one of Harrison’s most commercially successful albums and produced his first #1 Billboard hit single since 1973 with “I Got My Mind Set on You.”
Though Cloud Nine would be the last solo album that Harrison released in his lifetime, the collaboration with Lynne would inspire Harrison’s desire to collaborate again—much like Petty, Harrison was comforted by the idea of being in a band.
Shortly after the Cloud Nine sessions concluded, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne attended the Dylan and the Heartbreakers concert in Birmingham, England, and the subsequent four-night run at the Wembley Arena in London that ended the Temples in Flames Tour, going backstage to hang with the band after the shows.
This is where Petty met Lynne for the first time. Then, by chance, Petty and Lynne met again a month and a half later in Los Angeles.
Jeff Lynne remembered the meeting, saying, “I was driving in Beverly Hills and this horn kept blowing. And I thought, ‘Who the hell’s that?’ And it was Tom. He was going, ‘Pull over. I wanna have a word with ya.’ We pulled over and he said, ‘Oh, I really like what you did with George’s album. Do you fancy doing something together?’ I said, ‘Oh, that’d be nice, y’know.’” Regardless of how it happened, the two were keen on collaborating on music.
Less than a month later, Petty and Lynne had yet another chance encounter,this time in the Valley.
Tom remembered in Conversations, “I was with my daughter Adria, and we were out Christmas shopping. We had driven over to Studio City, there was this one restaurant there on Ventura called Le Seur, a French restaurant that was a really good restaurant. ... It was kind of our special night restaurant.
I pulled in the parking lot and we came in. I sat down in my chair, and the waiter came over and he said, ‘There’s a friend of your’s [sic] here and he’d like you to come over to the table.’
So that’s all he said. I said, ‘Oh,’ and I got up and walked around—there was kind of this private dining room — and as I walk in, there’s George [Harrison]. He was having lunch with some people from Warner Bros.
Jeff. And as I walked into the room, Jeff was writing my number down for George. And George said, ‘How strange, I’d just gotten your number and somebody told me you’d walked into the restaurant at the same time.’”
Harrison would follow Petty and Adria home to the house Petty was renting. According to Petty: The Biography, Harrison strummed “Norwegian Wood” on a guitar and joked with Petty by asking him, “You know this one, don’t you?” It would mark the beginning of several collaborations between Petty, Harrison, and Lynne over the next several years, and a friendship between Petty and Harrison that would last the rest of Harrison’s life.
