Saturday Morning Soundtrack: "Saving Grace" -- Tom Petty

Right now, in our rock and roll writing class my students are finding rock music that inspires them and creating flash nonfiction pieces we are calling "Liner Notes" where they try to capture their elusive, sometimes visceral reactions to the music, using lyrical language, a critical eye, and vivid imagery. I'll be joining them in this project over the next few months, posting video links to a few of my favorites and my responses to them. Some of these songs will be recent, some I'll be revisiting from a far way off. I don't claim to be a music critic, just a diehard fan. Hope you enjoy!

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"Saving Grace" -- Tom Petty (2006)

I remember the first time I heard this song. I had just purchased the newest Tom Petty CD and, knowing I had a big summer fishing trip to Canada coming up, I held off on listening to it, delaying gratification in anticipation of the long drive ahead. On the morning of the trip, I woke early and, still half asleep with the first leg of the drive all to myself, pulled on my headphones, leaned against the car door and pushed play. The swampy opening guitar riff sounded like something Petty’d borrowed from John Lee Hooker, spare and gritty, accented by a lone cymbal that tracks back and forth from one ear to the other. Then we get hand claps. Petty’s voice: older, but still distinctive. More guitars. Piano way down low. Haunted-house organs. More guitars--sliding now. Layer upon layer. Building, building, into a controlled explosion of full-bodied roots rock.

Damn.

The album is called Highway Companion, and there’s no way to describe the experience of hearing this song for the first time the way it’s meant to be heard, on the move, passing sleeping cities, fading by degrees. It’s not your typical driving music, not Steppenwolf. This album's about travel, motion, and the open road, but not about being young and stupid and carefree. Petty’s highways are remote, filled with lost memories and regrets, lonesome sundowns, displacement, homelessness, and that realization that you are growing older, flirting with time. I was convinced that Petty had somehow written the album for me and me alone.

Years later, as I prepared to leave Ohio for good, I bought the expanded edition so I could listen to the previously unreleased tracks. Suddenly rich in Petty albums, I gifted my spare copy to a friend, a woman ten years my senior who'd lived a life very unlike my own. She called me the next day to thank me, and just before we hung up, she said, "You know, I can't shake the feeling that all the songs on that album were written about me.”

That’s the beauty of Tom Petty.

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Love the song? Hate it? Think I've got it all wrong?Please, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. And, if you would like to write a Guest Entry for the "Saturday Morning Soundtrack" series where you creatively respond to one of your favorite rock songs, don't hesitate to contact me with queries.