45 REVELATIONS
If I had to pick my favorite recordmaker these days, I’d say Tom Petty. Springsteen (main rival) may tackle weightier issues, with more powerful impact at times, but Petty has a lightness of touch I find more appealing, and song for song his records simply sound better.
45 REVELATIONS
Ken Barnes
If I had to pick my favorite recordmaker these days, I’d say Tom Petty. Springsteen (main rival) may tackle weightier issues, with more powerful impact at times, but Petty has a lightness of touch I find more appealing, and song for song his records simply sound better. He’s also no slouch lyrically: on the new LP, “Rebel’”s shift from the Personal to a century-old Confederate grudge is plenty deft, and the redneck bullying the punk on “Spike” is worthy of Randy Newman.
But this isn’t an album review. I don’t do albums. This is about another in a stellar series of singles that could fill a paragraph if I were paid by the word—the new Petty single, “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Lyrically it’s one of his Tom Petulant “get lost” putdowns along the lines of “What Are You Doing In My Life,” not a real endearing stance. But the music is a glorious, eclectic clutter of sitars (!), cellos (always room for cellos), and, toward the end, an all-consuming wah-wah solo of the sort absent from the scene since Hendrix’s “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” or the Electric Prunes’ first Voxx testimonial.