Tom Petty - Highway Companion

Fair warning, this is going to be a negative review. Somewhere back there on the dusty two-lane we've been traversing i implied Tom Petty's 3rd and last solo album wasn't good. Let's find out if i'm right.

Saving Grace is a bad-ass opener. If that's the album we're in for, then hell to the yeah.

Fuuuuuuck. Square One is an even worse drive off the cliff than Heartbeat City. I'll point out some of the low-lights, but this is another one of those albums that sounds exactly like random crap.

Flirting with Time sounds like a terrible 90s sitcom theme song, or like if the Oneders had survived their one hit to make an unnecessary 14th album.

Jack is just terrible. No, like terrible terrible. You could maybe appreciate the experiment he was trying to experiment with, but it straight up sounds terrible.

Turn This Car Around is much better, but we have to address the problem head on. The entire album is scattershot Tom Petty cliches. It's a scrap quilt of everything "tom petty" about Tom Petty. Now, that makes total sense in the context of Tom Petty retiring like he publicly planned to do, but as a listening experience i need all the dramamine stat.

That might not seem particularly problematic to you, but he's doing a crappy job of it. None of his self quotations make any sense. The full-on "You're so bad" chords, but now the lyrics are "(i need a) big weekend? Ugh, the toms sound like freakin' Timpani on Damaged by Love.

This Old Town is another one of those overtly ripping off Tom Petty in all the wrong ways tracks. 

The Leaning To Fly intro, but we're "ankle deep in love." Barf. 

Seriously, That synth sound on The Golden Rose is straight out of Italo-House. It sounds like he's literally about to do a cover of Haddaway's What Is Love. Nope, instead he Rick-rolled his own album with the slowest imaginable Elton John throwaway dirge.

Longest 44 minutes this side of Meatloaf. We've barely made it 60 miles, dude.

Ok, ok, we have to look at what he did right. It's not a road-trip album, but every song specifically and literally references a living on the road mentality. That part works. It's also full of inappropriate space-synth sounds, so the "Curious George Goes On A One Way Trip To Mars" cover art is not lying to you in any way.

But unlike Wildflowers (my favorite Tom Petty album), the completely different Tom Petty you get on every single track is so jarring that it's completely unlistenable.

Then we gotta talk about how Rick Rubin loud this thing is. It's horrible, and it turns out the back story is more interesting than the actual album. Rubin produced Wildflowers, and from then on Petty had a deal with American Recordings. The trouble with that is after this album Rubin switched to Columbia distribution, but Petty was a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner (Warner and Sony aren't friends, in case you didn't know), so they downgraded him to Reprise for the remainder of his career.

You might think there's not really much difference between The Heartbreakers and solo Tom Petty, and in a sense you're right, but it's that squinting into the sun technical kind of right for a given value of true. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is a small fraction of Tom Petty the songwriter; he gave a lot of his songs away to other people because he hated the industry, but the solo albums are in a sense what he alone wanted to make. The first two are spectacular, obviously, but this last one is bad. My criteria for bad is different from most people, i mean it in the sense that he did a bad job. Even though the concept is fine, the end of an era recap of all the miles we traveled, this is a sloppy, meandering, pointless album filled with bizarre, non-sequiter walls of weird sounds. The more tender sentiments are surrounded by elephantine rock-symphony textures, and the moments of minimal focus and clarity all beg the question "why in the world would anyone want to sound like that on purpose?"

Hate me if you must, but Highway Companion sounds like the Cliff's Notes version of Tom Petty, but the rough draft with typos and factual errors and the plot of a completely different book mixed in.