Tom Petty - HighwayCompanion

Fri 8th Sep, 2006 in Music Reviews

It’s been twelve years since his last solo outing, and four years since The Last DJ album he recorded with the Heartbreakers, but Tom Petty has already got one award lined up for his new album Highway Companion - that of the most appropriate album title of the year.  From the opening chords of ‘Saving Grace’ to the closing strains of ‘The Golden Rose’, you can almost feel the road coming through the headphones.  The freedom, the scent, the sight of the long, endless highway stretching out into the horizon, they’re all there.  Looking at the song titles, this becomes even more apparent – ‘Turn This Car Around’, ‘Down South’, ‘Night Driver’...

It’s a particularly interesting analogy because the songs on offer here aren’t often celebrating the freedom and endless possibility the road brings. What ‘Highway Companion’ represents is ordinary people trying their best to escape their current situations, or somehow get back to the way things used to be. Whether it’s the defiant ‘I’m goin’ back’ in ‘Turn This Car Around’, or the acceptance that ‘time, baby, is catching up with you’, these two themes characterise much of the album.

‘Saving Grace’’s reprise ‘it’s hard to say/who you are these days’ is Petty’s comment on the world today, and how, in the words of the man himself to Rolling Stone, “a lot of people aren’t really sure who they are anymore, and are just trying to keep their head above water”. The song ranks as one of Petty’s best, and is probably the catchiest he’s released in well over a decade.

The tender ballad ‘Square One’ is the quietest moment on Highway Companion, and once again is imbued with a resigned, almost bitter tone – ‘It took a world of trouble, it took a world of tears, it took a long time, to get back here.’  Likely second single ‘Flirting With Time’ and the dramatic and rootsy ‘Turn This Car Around’ are classic Petty.

You always know what you’re going to get when you pick up a Tom Petty album.  The Dylan in tune voice, the always catchy but substantial choruses and harmonies, locomotive rhythms and a damn fine Highway Companion for those long nights on the road.