Songfacts®:

• In "Casa Dega," Tom Petty tells the story of a mystical experience with a palm reader.
  
  Oh baby now I think I'm starting to believe the things that I've heard
  Cause tonight in Casa Dega I hang on every word
  
  That she said to me as she holds my hand
  And reads the lines of a stranger
  Yeah and she knows my name yeah she knows my plan
  In the past in the present and for the future
  
  In the song, he goes there without great expectations but finds himself becoming a full believer in the woman's psychic powers. The experience shocks him and broadens his perspective of reality.
• Petty sings the song as if it were a real experience, which is interesting because "Casa Dega" is about a real place in Petty's home state, but Petty was never there.
  
  Cassadaga (Petty misspells it in the song) is an unincorporated community in Volusia County, Florida, founded in 1875. It's home to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp and has been called the Psychic Capital of the World.
  
  Petty read a New York Times article about Cassadaga while on an airplane. "There are all kinds of psychics and fortune tellers," he explained of the town. "It's this really small place. And I wrote that by putting myself in the mind of someone who went to Cassadaga. Though I spelled it wrong... Poetic license, I guess."
• "Casa Dega" was the B-side to the "Don't Do Me Like That" single, recorded for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' third album, Damn the Torpedoes, but it didn't make the tracklist. Petty later added it onto a bonus disc included in the Damn the Torpedoes 2010 deluxe edition.
• During his 1978 New Year's Eve concert in Santa Monica, California, Petty introduced "Casa Dega" by saying, "This is a song about this town in Florida that has like 35 acres of weird people."
• This is one of three Damn the Torpedoes songs Petty cowrote with his guitarist, Mike Campbell. The others are "Refugee" and "Here Comes My Girl."