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2 posts categorized "Tom Petty"

June 14, 2010

Album review: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 'Mojo'

Mojo 3 stars (out of 4)

Tom Petty has been making albums with the Heartbreakers since 1976, but “Mojo” is the first studio release in which the band sounds like it’s on equal footing with the songs.

That’s both a plus and minus. Petty’s best songs have a certain economy best-served by terse arrangements and the self-effacing interplay of his bandmates. But “Mojo” (Reprise) spotlights the interplay of the Heartbreakers, and gives guitarist Mike Campbell room to stretch.

A master at weaving different colors through Petty’s songs, Campbell brings a new boldness to his playing, as is instantly apparent with the opening fanfare on “First Flash of Freedom.” The songs aren’t exactly jam-fests, but they feel looser, stretching out to accommodate his solos. In “Good Enough,” his six-string fire evokes the soul-blues drama of the Allman Brothers at their vintage best, and “I Should Have Known It” is harder still, a flashback to Led Zeppelin.

Though the album was recorded in the band’s North Hollywood, Calif., rehearsal space, it brims with references to the Heartbreakers’ collective past in the deep South, with its images of sugarcane, moonshine and a grandfather’s pulpwood factory off U.S. Hwy. 41 in Florida. That makes the undeniable blues undercurrent in songs like “Jefferson Jericho Blues,” “Takin’ My Time,” “Candy,” “U.S. 41” and “Let Yourself Go” understandable. These aren’t classic Petty songs, but they are sturdy vehicles for a terrific, if frequently underrated band.

greg@gregkot.com

Related: Tom Petty, the interview

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Tom Petty Store

June 01, 2010

Tom Petty, the interview: 'I wanted to rough it up'

Petty
Tom Petty performs at the United Center on July 2, 2008. (Tribune photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo)

No one could blame Tom Petty for feeling a little entitled. After all, most rock stars who have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, played the Super Bowl halftime and sold more than 60 million records are well into the rock-royalty phases of their career. Which means they’re coasting.

But Petty is a rock star who doesn’t behave like one. He’s more about work and process, rather than rewards and nostalgia. Chalk it up to his working-class Florida roots or a litany of potentially career-ending (or at least career-sidetracking) roadblocks: the break-up of his first band, Mudcrutch; Petty’s bankruptcy in 1979 amid a record-company squabble; the 1997 dissolution of his 22-year marriage to Jane Benyo that plunged him into a depression; the death of longtime bassist Howie Epstein in 2002.

Yet Petty is making some of the best music of his career right now, no small feat for a rocker who has been at it for more than 30 years. He released an excellent solo album in 2006, “Highway Companion,” playing most of the instruments himself. He followed it up by reassembling Mudcrutch for the 2008 better-late-than-never debut album they didn’t get a chance to make the first time around. And on June 15, he and his band the Heartbreakers will release, “Mojo” (Reprise), an unusually unvarnished document of the band in top form.
       
In a recent interview before beginning a tour that brings him and the Heartbreakers to the United Center on July 17, Petty at 59 sounded fired up – or as fired up as anyone with a relaxed, Southern drawl can. For him, the music yet to be made is still the most exciting part of a career that is showing no signs of self-satisfied stasis.

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