{"id":41095,"date":"2008-09-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hard-promises\/"},"modified":"2008-09-09T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T00:00:00","slug":"hard-promises","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hard-promises\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard Promises"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s interesting to consider the parallels between Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen\u2019s careers. Both grew up on the East Coast \u2013 Petty in Florida<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> and Springsteen in New Jersey<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> \u2013 but had their plain-spoken, rootsy music come to be labeled as \u201cheartland rock.\u201d Both are singer-songwriters of the first order whose backing bands are rightfully almost as famous as their leader. And both decided that immediately following their breakthrough third album was the right time to wage an epic battle against the people dumb enough to continue trying to tell them what to do.<\/p>\n

In Springsteen\u2019s case the conflict was with his first manager\/producer Mike Appel; the three-year gap between his 1975 breakthrough Born To Run<\/i> and its follow-up Darkness On The Edge Of Town<\/i> was due almost entirely to legal maneuvering between the two antagonists (Springsteen eventually won).<\/p>\n

In a move surely at least in part inspired by Springtsteen\u2019s battle, after the resounding success of 1979\u2019s Damn The Torpedoes<\/i> made Petty a star, he promptly went to war with his own label for greater control over his career. The chief sticking point that emerged over time was pricing; MCA had just decided to raise album retail prices for \u201cA-list\u201d artists by a dollar, to $9.98. Petty objected to Hard Promises<\/i> getting the higher sticker price and withheld the album for months until MCA finally gave in and released it with an $8.98 pricetag.<\/p>\n

The kickoff track and leadoff single from the resulting LP seemed to play off of the conflict. \u201cThe Waiting\u201d features one of Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell\u2019s signature jangly riffs, a terrific hook anchoring a song about perseverance that declares rather pointedly that \u201cThe waiting is the hardest part.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next up is \u201cA Woman In Love,\u201d a song that\u2019s always stuck in my craw a bit. This one should have been home run; the lyric cuts directly to the heart of the matter (\u201cShe\u2019s a woman in love \/ But it\u2019s not me\u201d), and the arrangement allows plenty of space for Benmont Tench\u2019s moody organ work, but somehow the end product comes off just a bit too dry and calculated, like a gem that\u2019s been polished more than it needed to be.<\/p>\n

The next few tracks loosen things up considerably, as Petty sets aside relationship riddles for a few minutes and indulges in character-driven vignettes about a laconic \u201cNightwatchman,\u201d a pair of petty criminals plucked straight from an Elmore Leonard novel (\u201cSomething Big\u201d), and his first trip to London (the steady-rocking and quite fun \u201cKings Road\u201d). Ever the entertaining story-teller, here Petty\u2019s charm is fresh and you can hear the wink in his voice on the punchlines.<\/p>\n

The second half of Hard Promises<\/i> sees a noticeable dropoff in the strength of the songs. The best to my ears is the ringing \u201cA Thing About You,\u201d which brings back some of the sass and snap of Petty\u2019s first two discs. Less interesting is the rather somber \u201cInsider,\u201d from which the album title is taken, and on which Petty duets with Stevie Nicks, returning the favor after Petty and Campbell gave her the dynamite single \u201cStop Draggin\u2019 My Heart Around\u201d for her solo debut Belladonna<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The other notable thing about Hard Promises<\/i> is that it\u2019s the album where the downside of Petty\u2019s prodigious songwriting talent first became apparent. While he\u2019s incredibly prolific, with Hard Promises<\/i> Petty began to experience diminishing returns, i.e. fewer \u201cgreat\u201d songs and more \u201cpretty good\u201d ones. With one exception \u2013 his 1989 solo debut Full Moon Fever<\/i> — he would never again issue an album with as many essential songs or as few unessential ones as he did with Damn The Torpedoes<\/i>. From this point onward, an unhappy word inevitably creeps into the reviewer\u2019s vocabulary when describing Petty\u2019s albums: filler.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t change the fact that Hard Promises<\/i> is one of Petty and band\u2019s stronger albums, from the magnificent hook that kicks off \u201cThe Waiting\u201d through the muscular, Stones-meet-the-Byrds bounce of \u201cA Thing About You.\u201d This might not rank in his top three albums, but it\u2019s not far down the list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6253],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-41095","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-tom-petty-the-heartbreakers","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41095"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}