(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
Sat 14 June 2025 1:00, UK
There was something inherently trustworthy about Tom Petty. To be clear, I don’t want to make assumptions about anyone through their art; we’ve been doing that too much for too many years. Since the man was an active musician in the 1970s, there are almost certainly skeletons in his closet that we don’t know about. However, his empathetic songwriting and vividly sketched characters made his everyman demeanour a lot more believable than most.
He came across as a normal guy who just so happened to become one of the world’s biggest and most beloved rock stars. Perhaps that was why, later in life, he was able to do something with his songwriting that barely any of his peers were able to do. He wrote about modern life in a way that didn’t make you roll your eyes so violently they pop straight out of your ears. For the most part, that straight up doesn’t happen.
With precious few exceptions, there’s basically nothing worse than when aging rockstars write about “modern life”. I put that statement in quotation marks because often, the very last thing they’re writing about is actual modern life. These past-it old millionaires stagnating in their manors have no idea what’s happening in the modern life, and why would they?
Their only exposure to anything outside of their multi-million-pound model train set is the bigotry and disinformation jambalaya being served up by social media and GB News. Of course anything they write as a response to the modern world is going to be a cringe-worthy bollocks casserole. Yet Tom Petty wasn’t just able to write with genuine thoughtfulness about the times he lived in; he more or less predicted our lives in 2025 two decades early.
Which Tom Petty song was decades ahead of its time?
In 2006, Petty released his third and, as we would sadly discover later, final solo album, Highway Companion. A collaboration with friend and fellow Traveling Wilburys bandmate Jeff Lynne, the set finds Petty in a typically reflective mood right off the bat. Opener ‘Saving Grace’ sees Petty speaking as someone who has spent his life watching America change from the window of a tour bus or plane, and wondering what it’s changing into.
“It’s hard to say who you are these days / But you run on anyway / Don’t you, baby?” He says, over typically spirited Rickenbacker riffs. “You keep running for another place / To find that saving grace”. It’s clear that this was a song close to Petty’s heart, and not only due to its place at the very front of the album and as its lead single.
In an interview with Neil Strauss for Rolling Stone, Petty talked extensively about what the song meant to him. He said the song is, “how I see the times. There are a lot of people who aren’t sure who they are anymore, so they’re just trying to keep their head above water because things are moving really fast these days. There is a lot of information flying around, and a lot of people are staring into their palms.”
I cannot stress enough how this was an interview conducted in 2006. It could have been said in 2025, and it would still have been absolutely bang on the money. I suppose that’s the difference between Petty and his legions of self-satisfied peers. They were all desperate for something to say but didn’t really have anything worth saying. Petty was unlike all of them and always had something poignant to say. May we all grow and age as gracefully as he did.
Related Topics
The Far Out Music Newsletter
All the latest music news from the independant voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.