August 29 2006
Album Review: Tom Petty – Highway Companion
posted by Steven Shaw at 4:45 pm
Tom Petty – Highway Companion (American/Warner Music)
Tom Petty’s third solo album sans The Heartbreakers is already being touted as one of his best.
Hell, I’m still enjoying 2002’s The Last DJ, recorded with the Heartbreakers. That release didn’t gain much traction, probably due to its serious subject matter – the corporatisation of rock and roll.
But the latest album, entitled Highway Companion, is a gentle affair, with a helping of Traveling Wilburys-style acoustic guitar. It comes as no surprise then, that like 1989’s Full Moon Fever, it’s produced by fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne, along with Petty and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.
Petty’s songs revisit familiar characters as they travel via car, plane, and even horse, looking for redemption and dwelling on past wrongs before time catches up with them. ‘Living free is gaining on me/Can’t keep ahead of my dreams’ he sings in “This Old Town”.
Throughout the album, his lyrics impart dream-like flashes – ‘A coyote ran across the road’ from “Square One” – and cinematic imagery – ‘Above a lonely feather circles to the ground’ from “Turn This Car Around”.
At 55, Petty is entering that veteran rocker age, where it becomes more important for his songs to mean something – to both him and his fans. He may be in a reflective state of mind here, but in terms of songcraft he’s setting the bar pretty high.
If the album suffers from anything, it’s the similarity in tempo from track to track and safe sounding musical performances. But that’s just splitting hairs, and besides, radio programmers will love it for that.
Highway Companion is Petty’s strongest album in many years. It’s haunted by the ghosts of his past, but it also delivers fun when you need it – like in “Big Weekend”: ‘Need a big weekend/kick up the dust/need a big weekend/if you don’t run you rust.’ Keep on running, Tom.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:26 am
TP has apparently done his last official interview ever saying -”My mind is so delicate and I’m sure it comes form the life I have lived.”
Refreshing that, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, he’s steered well clear of the (fashionable) raging against the presidency and chosen instead to document the vanishing of personal freedoms and the trend towards total disposability of music as an artform.
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Ahhhh, it was Steven who’d posted on TP… I was trying to remember who I’d read about this album – I’ve not yet bought it, but will, instead I bought Dylan’s Modern Times which is fantastic.