“There’s rain on the road And the faithful have gone. In a crowd all alone, Walking ’round in a song”. It’s a great little snapshot or vignette, as Tom so often gives us, of perhaps a wedding or some other celebration at a small roadside church. That feeling of being alone in a crowd is…

Night Driver is one of those perfect album tracks that you always want to hear on great records. There’s something to be said for albums where any song could basically be a single, but I tend to gravitate more towards albums that are very carefully curated around a central idea and Highway Companion is definitely…

The first verse contains one of my all time favourite lyrics. Not just one of my very favourite Tom Petty lyrics, just one of my favourite lyrics full stop. And it’s not a superb piece of word play or a huge emotionally charge line. It’s not a cuttingly brilliant philosophically brilliant observation – we get…

“Revisited” Series

In my mind’s eye, I see a younger couple, maybe mid to late twenties, driving an old cadillac along a dark desert highway… A kid, about 7 or 8 years is in the back seat having a bad dream: not exactly a nightmare but one of those dreams that feels you feeling really unsettled for…

Jack is a peculiar song. It doesn’t have a typical structure and it’s much more a mood piece. As I said, I sort of consider this one to be a chance encounter on the Highway Tom is taking us down. We don’t spend any quality time with this character but we’re left with a slightly…

Every now and then I try to think about my top ten Tom Petty deep cuts. There are so many that I love and that I’ve discovered, rediscovered, or come to appreciate so much more as I’ve been on this podcast journey, but Down South is at the very top table for me in that…

“You’re flirting with time” Tom sings. And I like that idea of not fully committing to time, just flirting with it. That’s definitely how life feels when you’re in your twenties and thirties. You don’t really have to enter into a serious relationship with time because there’s so much of it still ahead. You can…

Saving Grace is the work of a middle-aged man who fully knows himself and knows how to articulate the past and the present in three very vivid dimensions. Critical to retaining the song’s pathos though, Tom doesn’t project a future down this new path. It’s important that Square One is here and now. It’s important…

“You keep running for another place To find that saving grace” probably doesn’t hit in the same place for most Pettyheads as “Most things I worry about never happen anyway” but I think there’s a comparable profundity to it. That search for spiritual, or social, or emotional redemption is a journey and one that can…