“It’s quieter but not mellow”: The album Tom Petty said he had to grow into
Most artists can only write from the moment they are living in whenever they go into the studio. As much as people like to write characters in their tunes, it’s impossible to take someone in their 20s talking from the perspective of someone in their 60s when they don’t have that kind of lived-in experience behind everything. But even though Tom Petty needed time for some of his songs to digest, that didn’t mean that he was about to start slowing down when he reached his middle age.
In fact, Petty seemed to have one of the best second winds of his contemporaries when he got out of his 20s. Outside of joining one of the greatest supergroups of the modern age, Petty was always willing to push his songwriting forward, whether that was working with Jeff Lynne on Full Moon Fever or returning to the more authentic approach when working with Rick Rubin on Wildflowers.
When looking at the individual stories in his songs, though, Petty seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds every time he got to the studio. His back catalogue had already been populated with everything from old-school rock and roll songs to the kind of laid-back country tunes, but across records like The Last DJ, he was painting pictures of the version of rock and roll that had been slipping away thanks to big business.
That kind of record was never going to resonate with everyone, but this wasn’t a case of Petty being a crotchety old man. This was him being the more punk version of himself by going against the industry, but once he got that out of his system, he knew that it was time for him to go back to the drawing board by bringing back Lynne for the album Highway Companion.
And while going from his most critical record to a lighthearted acoustic record is a much bigger jump than people expected, Petty’s material here is much more captivating than before. He always excelled in writing a midtempo tune on tracks like ‘To Find a Friend’, so hearing the rockers loosen up on ‘Saving Grace’ or the countrified ‘Big Weekend’ led to some of the greatest moments in his later career.
“It’s not a real loud record or an all-out rock fest. It’s quieter but not mellow. I wanted to make this for a long time. It’s not a record I could have made in the ’70s.”
Tom Petty
But looking back at the rest of his career, Petty admitted that he could have never made this kind of record when he was starting out, saying, “It’s not a real loud record or an all-out rock fest. It’s quieter but not mellow. I wanted to make this for a long time. It’s not a record I could have made in the ’70s. I wasn’t seasoned enough.”
Compared to the ballads he made in the 1970s, though, the mellow parts of the album hit a lot harder than before. ‘Square One’ is fairly simple from a production standpoint, but when he talks about the world of tears that brought him to this point in his life, you can tell in his voice the kind of sorrow that he was talking about.
Because outside of losing Howie Epstein and going through a massive separation from his wife on Echo, Highway Companion is the first instance of Petty channelling his inner strength again. He had lashed out in anger and been far more caustic in the years leading up to this record, so this was a reminder that he still had that same carefree spirit inside him that gave birth to songs like ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
