We often talk about album openers and closers and I’m sure my pal John Paulsen and I will get into that next week, but of all the songs that were included on this record, the opener and the closer just scream at you on Highway Companion. Both Saving Grace and The Golden Rose have momentum…

Origins Series

Let’s talk about the lyrics to this one first. Tom goes on to say “You don’t have a lot of room to write a story in a song. So you have to be economical with your lines.” and we’ve remarked on that on so many occasions with Tom’s story songs – he usually gives us…

We’ve talked a few times this season about the fact that the album wasn’t finished when Tom played the songs for Paul Zollo. In the book, he tells Paul, “I still haven’t figured out where to put it in the sequence. Right now I have it at the end, but I don’t think it’s the…

The Art of Songwriting

“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…