TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS
Produced by Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Ryan Ulyate
All music and lyrics by Tom Petty
except "Fault Lines" music and lyrics by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell
PERSONNEL:
Tom Petty: Lead vocals, backing vocals, rhythm guitars, fuzz bass, high bass
Mike Campbell: Lead guitar
Benmont Tench: Piano, organ, electric piano, keyboards, synthesizers, mellotron
Scott Thurston: Harmonica, guitars
Ron Blair: Bass guitars
Steve Ferrone: Drums, percussion
Released July 29, 2014
A few years ago, I was watching an interview with Tom Petty as conducted by PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley. During the course of the interview, Smiley asked Petty what it felt like to be approaching the age of 60, especially as a performing artist in rock and roll. Petty responded slyly by expressing that when he was a much younger man and just beginning as a working musician, he looked to the age of 60 as being the time at wen he thought that life would be pretty much "wrapped up." Now that he was just at about that age, he is adamant that his musical activities were indeed not anywhere near being wrapped up and he still felt that he had much more to say. Does he ever and let us all be thankful that he does.
"Hypnotic Eye," the thirteen studio album from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and their first release to hit the charts at #1, is a snarling, tightly wound collection that finds the 63 year old Petty and his musical compatriots in peak form and with no signs of slowing down or becoming musically irrelevant. In contrast to the psychedelic "Mudcrutch" (released April 29, 2008), Petty reunion with his pre-Heartbreakers band and the expansive, blues based "Mojo" (released June 15, 2010), the previous album with the Heartbreakers, "Hypnotic Eye" is a blast of raw, garage rock and rock power performed with the exuberance of teenagers thrashing around but with the musical complexity and texture that comes from seasoned veterans. Lyrically, however, Petty is in a ferocious, yet grimly contemplative, mood as he looks out across the national landscape and clearly does not like what he sees, therefore making the new album not only a musically political companion piece to Bruce Springsteen's "High Hopes" (released January 14, 2014) and even The Roots' "...and then you shoot your cousin" (released May 19, 2014) but also as an update of Petty and the Heartbreakers' angry and elegiac "The Last DJ" (released October 8, 2002).
"Hypnotic Eye" opens with the petulant stomp of the brilliantly entitled "American Dream Plan B," the first of the album's several character monologues that merge the frustrations of the disenfranchised and disappointed with Petty's singular and trademark resolve.
"Well, my mama's so sad, daddy's just mad
'Cause I ain't gonna have the chance he had
My success is anybody's guess,
But like a fool I'm bettin' on happiness
I got a dream, I'm gonna fight 'til I get it
I got a dream, I'm gonna fight 'til I get it right..."
The turbulence continues with "Fault Lines." Propelled by stinging double tracked guitar riffs and Steve Ferrone's near calypso drum patterns, this track serves to illustrate exactly why Petty is one of our golden rock and roll songwriting treasures as his sheer economy of words reveals a world of emotions that could shift from the interpersonal to the society at large ("See those fault lines laid out like landmines/It's hard to relax/A promise broken, the ground breaks open/Love falls through the cracks").
Throughout the album, we are given portraits of desolation in "Burnt Out Town", and the voices of those cast aside in the despairing, Bo Diddley beat driven "Forgotten Man" ("Well, I feel like a four letter word/I know what few can know/How angry words can pierce the heart/How a soul can sink so low"). Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers also give us more intimate narrative of shady, philandering characters seeking redemption in "Sins Of My Youth" as well as the disturbing velocity of "All You Can Carry" which expertly evokes either the rushed life saving escape from California wildfires or more truthfully, any oncoming apocalypse that threatens to sweep us away in its shock waves ("Take what you, all you can carry/Take what you can and leave the past behind/We gotta run").
The serendipitous timeliness of the bluesy "Power Drunk" cannot be overstated, most especially in our so-called "post-racial" society and the current devastating conflicts occurring in the embattled Fergurson, Missouri. In Petty's trademark drawl, he sings the following:
"Pin on a badge and a man begins to change
Starts believing that there's nothing out of his range
You and I are left in the wind
In the wake of a rich man's sin"
Political and poetic, thoughtful and tenacious, the album closing "Shadow People," which runs nearly seven minutes is the band's lament at the increasing sense of interpersonal disconnect within our culture at despite all of or technological advances designed to bring us closer together. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers somberly deliver an all too true vision of a world where people have ceased to try and know each other beyond any aspect of stereotypes and even archetypes, therefore making all of us exist within some ephemeral state, unable to determine any specific characteristics of anyone other than ourselves, and losing ourselves in the process, therefore bringing about or own extinction.
"And this one carries a gun for the USA
He's a 21st Century man
And he's scary as hell
'Cause when he's afraid
He'll destroy everything he don't understand"
This track has got to be the most chilling piece of music the band has ever laid down, as far as I am able to remember as I course through my mental history of the band's discography. And how rightly so, as Petty lyrics throughout the album are so up to the minute, and brilliantly so, as he also does not name any specifics, therefore allowing all of us listening to make any necessary connections and interpretations.
"Hypnotic Eye" is also not entirely consumed with doom and gloom. The Prince-ly entitled "U Get Me High" seems to be a nod to the magic of inspiration itself, complete with a classic Petty sing-a-long chorus while "Full Grown Boy" is a soft-shoe jazz shuffle of romantic adoration.
And then, there's the glorious "Red River," a song that could just exist a few miles from the psychedelic "Crystal River" as performed by Petty's Mudcrutch combo. A character study of a gypsy woman who possesses "a 3D Jesus in a picture frame" as well as a rosary, rabbit's foot, black cat bone and tiger tooth, extends itself to the dreamworld of the song's title location, a free flowing, love blooming utopian respite from the remainder of the American landscape as depicted through "Hypnotic Eye."
"So meet me tonight at the red river
Where the water is clear and cold
Meet me tonight at the red river
And look down into your soul"
"Red River" finds Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers still majestically able to spin sonic power pop gold as the track simply flies. It is a song that already feels as if it is a classic, made all the more remarkable that it is brand new, as it was recorded on November 20, 2013, as written in the liner notes. Tom Petty's voice sounds so sublimely youthful as if none of the years have passed by and completely belying the fact that he is now three years past the age of being "wrapped up," as he once mused so long ago.
This is the triumph of this long standing American rock and roll treasure that is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, serious musicians who have the uncanny ability to make it all look so effortless and easy when in truth what we receive are the results of their artistry which is achieved through diligence, commitment and the tenacity that comes with the work of ensuring every song is a great song.
"Hypnotic Eye" extends the musical legacy of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers richly and beautifully with vitality, grit, heart, empathy and truth, the precise kind that is in such sadly short supply these days.
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