This is sounding more like old-man rock, so let’s get to the bangers. That adds bonus depth to gorgeous ballads like “Square One”, (which first materialized last year on Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown soundtrack) during which it’s easy to imagine Petty having coffee at the breakfast nook seemingly on the morning he’s cleared his mind of some past transgressions. “Saving Grace” certainly rocks, it’s doubly effective because it conjures up, with startling ease and efficiency, the commonly accepted notions of rocking - the splashing drums, the sinister but explosive guitars, the lyrics about flying through sleeping cities, “past statues that atone for my sins” en route to a sweetly, smirking refrain: “And it’s hard to say who you are these days / But you run on anyway / don’t you, baby?”Īt 55, Petty is beginning to sound a little rough around those edges, but in the case of a guy whose voice was never a thing of particularly exceptional beauty to begin with, that raggedness ends up adding extra warmth to an already burnished voice there’s something almost soothing about it. Petty lets it dangle, conjuring up in 30 seconds the gods from night-rides past: Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bruce Springsteen.
When Petty revs up the fan-friggin’-tastic first single “Saving Grace”, he lets the rockabilly guitar, the itchy, twitchy din-da-din-da-din percolate for a while, giving that hint of impending danger (or speed, or power, or life, whatever you want to call it) some added spice. Released on the Rick Rubin’s American label and recorded with erstwhile Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell and longtime collaborator Jeff Lynne, Highway Companion gets its job done in the appealingly workmanlike fashion you’d expect from such a lineup.īut there’s some things going on beneath, too. If anything, Highway Companion sounds like a thoughtful, sometimes melancholy, ode to the fading romanticized ideal of rock ‘n’ roll, the music-as-redemption theory one ostensibly posits more when one starts getting up in years (and starts tossing around his own retirement, as Petty has sort of done). Lest that be seen as any kind of slam, I’ll clarify: No, the 12 songs collected on Petty’s first solo-billed record since 1994’s sterling Wildflowers represent not the slightest twitch in game plan from Petty, who pens tracks like “Square One” and “Night Driver” with all the apparent effort of someone pouring a bowl of morning Frosted Flakes - and that’s what gives Highway Companion its reserved strength. It’s one of those satisfyingly straightforward rock truths, levied and laid bare by a master of the satisfyingly straightforward rock song, and collected here in a satisfyingly straightforward collection. The highway companion in question here - for Tom Petty and, it’s safe to guess, most of the listeners he’s amassed over a spot-on three-decade career - is clearly music (it is also probably Red Bull, beef jerky and Egg McMuffins, but that makes for a much clunkier and less romanticized title). Leave it to a reclusive Southern master to provide one of the year’s easiest titles to decipher.
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