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Tom Petty: Mojo

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Reprise Records
Released: 2010.06.15
Time:
 64:58
Category: Heartland Rock, Rock & Roll
Producer(s): Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Ryan Ulyate
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.tompetty.com
Appears with: Traveling Wilburys, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, George Harrison
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Jefferson Jericho Blues (T.Petty) - 3:24
[2] First Flash of Freedom (T.Petty/M.Campbell) - 6:53
[3] Running Man's Bible (T.Petty) - 6:02
[4] The Trip to Pirate's Cove (T.Petty) - 5:00
[5] Candy (T.Petty) - 4:12
[6] No Reason to Cry (T.Petty) - 3:04
[7] I Should Have Known It (T.Petty/M.Campbell) - 3:36
[8] U.S. 41 (T.Petty) - 3:01
[9] Takin' My Time (T.Petty) - 4:21
[10] Let Yourself Go (T.Petty) - 3:23
[11] Don't Pull Me Over (T.Petty) - 4:05
[12] Lover's Touch (T.Petty) - 4:24
[13] High In the Morning (T.Petty) - 3:36
[14] Something Good Coming (T.Petty) - 4:11
[15] Good Enough (T.Petty/M.Campbell)     5:57

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Tom Petty - Vocals, Rhythm Guitar, Lead & Bass Guitar on [3], Producer
Mike Campbell - Lead Guitar on [1-2,4-15], Producer
Scott Thurston - Rhythm Guitar, Harmonica
Benmont Tench - Acoustic & Electric Piano, Organ
Ron Blair - Bass Guitar on [1-2,4-15]
Steve Ferrone - Drums, Percussion
Ryan Ulyate - Engineer, Mixing, Producer

Greg Looper - Engineer, Monitor Engineer
Chris Bellman - Mastering
Jeri Heiden - Art Direction, Design
John Heiden - Art Direction, Design
Nick Steinhardt - Art Direction, Design
Sam Jones - Photography
Travis Weidel - Recording Assistant
Chant Peck - Technical Consultant
David Greene - Drum Technician
Brian Brown - Backline Technician
Jimbo Neal - Backline Technician
Steve Winstead - Backline Technician
Mark Carpenter - Transportation
Tony Dimitriades  - Management
Laurence Freedman - Management
Mary Klauzer - Management

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded in April 28, 2009 - January 11, 2010 at The Clubhouse, Los Angeles, California.



Tom Petty has been fronting the Heartbreakers off and on (mostly on) for over 30 years now, and he and his band have been delivering a high level of no-frills, classy, and reconstituted American garage rock through all of it. Petty often gets lumped in with artists like Bruce Springsteen, whose careful and worked-over lyrics carry a kind of instant nostalgia, but Petty's songwriting at its best cleverly bounces off of romance clichés, often with a desperate, lustful drawl and sneer, and he’s usually been more concerned with the here and now than he is about musing about what’s been abused and lost in contemporary America, although he's certainly not blind to it. Petty has always been more immediate than that -- until now, that is. Mojo is Petty's umpteenth album, and technically the first he’s done with the Heartbreakers since 2002’s sly The Last DJ. This time out he’s tackling the blues, trying to graft the Heartbreakers' (Mike Campbell on guitar, Scott Thurston on guitar and harmonica, Benmont Tench on keyboards, Ron Blair on bass, and Steve Ferrone on drums) patented 1960s garage sound to the Chicago blues sound of Chess Records in the 1950s. Sonically it certainly works, mostly because this is a wonderful band, but then it all seems a little tired, worn, and exhausted, too, and not a single song here has that certain desperate, determined defiance that Petty has always delivered in the past with a knowing sneer and a little leering wink. The opener, “Jefferson Jericho Blues,” is a case in point. It starts by being a song about Thomas Jefferson’s dalliance with one of his black maids, and it could have been a scathing indictment of an out-of-date Southern attitude, contemporary racism, and so much more. Instead, it tumbles unfocused into, well, a song about missing a girl and how time moves slow, and one can’t help but wonder why Petty dragged Thomas Jefferson and his maid into any of it in the first place. Petty has never sounded so emotionally drained and detached as a vocalist as he does on this album, and while it’s nice to hear the Heartbreakers flirt with the blues - and to hear Campbell's clear, precise slide guitar playing - there’s no excuse for not having solid songs to scaffold it. There’s a worn-out, regretful, and boringly meditative tone to so many tracks here - this is not what one expects from a band that rocks as fine as this one can. Again, the playing is solid, but one wishes Petty & the Heartbreakers had simply covered some of those old Chess classics rather than trying half-heartedly to write their own - it would have made for an album closer to intent.

Steve Leggett - All Music Guide



Some time in the last few years Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers took a left turn. Maybe it was when Petty woke up in the night with the idea of reuniting his first band, Mudcrutch, to cut the album they never got a chance to make back in the early 70's. Maybe it was when the Heartbreakers assembled the mammoth multi-disc 'The Live Anthology,' which detailed thirty years of concerts. Maybe it was when they gave all their home movies, outtakes and live footage to director Peter Bogdanovich to create the Grammy-winning four-hour career documentary 'Runnin Down A Dream.' There have been side projects and experiments since the band last went into the studio to cut a new Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers album.
With 'MOJO,' they have taken their recent freedom and experimentation to heart. They have gone off the reservation and all signs indicate they aren't coming back.

The first thing that hits you about 'MOJO' is that the spirit of the Mudcrutch sessions has carried on with the Heartbreakers. This is the sound of a band playing together in a room not a studio - facing each other, all singing and playing at the same time. The music is alive, with no overdubs or studio trickery. What you hear is what they created on the spot at that time.

Tom Petty says, 'With this album, I want to show other people what I hear with the band. 'MOJO' is where the band lives when it's playing for itself.'

As for the songs, 'MOJO' showcases a wide variety of American music from rock 'n' roll to country and both electric and acoustic blues. And then there are the images in Petty's lyrics which slip in on the melodies and set up a home in your head: The barefoot girl in the high grass chewing on a stick of sugar cane, the run-in with the law that begins when a carload of buddies decide to party with the motel maids, and the hilariously audacious idea of opening an album with an electric blues rocker about Thomas Jefferson's love affair with Sally Hemings. Petty would probably chuck a rock at anyone who called him a poet, but he sure is a southern writer of humor and sensitivity.

'MOJO' has juice and guts but it also has some sweet balladry for the slow dancers and even a wacked-out reggae number that is unlike anything that the Heartbreakers have done before. It's the kind of album nobody's supposed to be able to make anymore. It got here just in time.

Amazon.com



In his 50s, Tom Petty seems to be living the Grumpy Old Man phase of his career. His last album with the Heartbreakers, 2002's The Last DJ, bitterly attacked the state of the music business. This record – with the songs recorded live in the studio, and the equipment used by the band all listed (no guitar made after 1965 here, folks) – would appear to be the "Listen, youngsters, this is how we used to do it" one. That impression is heightened by the fact that Mojo is, largely, tasteful blues rock, with Mike Campbell's guitar to the fore. There are sparks of life in the rollicking country rock of US 41 and the spiralling riff of First Flash of Freedom, but it's all very polite. And in Don't Pull Me Over – a plea to a police officer for clemency over marijuana possession, set to an Eric Claptonesque vision of reggae – Petty may have written the worst song ever.

Michael Hann - 18 June 2010
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited



Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been one of America's greatest live bands since their first club tours and opening-act jobs, in 1976 and '77. Lethal garage-rock modernists with pop-hook savvy, they've always had the chops and empathy to make a studio record like Mojo: everybody in one room, going for the master take together and getting it fast. They just took 34 years to work up the nerve.

It was worth the wait. Mojo is dynamite — Petty and the Heartbreakers' matured return to the elementary fury of their first golden-twang era, capped by 1981's Hard Promises. The performances are natural knockouts — cocksure grooves, pithy knife-play guitars and little overdub fuss — worked up, then nailed, some on the first full take, at the band's suburban Los Angeles rehearsal space. Petty can't help stressing the authenticity here. The credits include the make and vintage of every instrument and the exact tracking date of each song. That's Petty playing a 1964 Gibson ES-335 guitar and lead guitarist Mike Campbell wielding his steady weapon, a '59 Les Paul Sunburst, on April 28th of last year, in the opening number, "Jefferson Jericho Blues."

That's almost too much detail, a distraction from what actually makes the song work: drummer Steve Ferrone and bassist Ron Blair's blues-train shuffle; Campbell's snarling breaks; the way Scott Thurston's harp dogs the guitars, Little Walter-style, the whole way. "I'm writing it for the band to play," Petty told us last fall, referring to the songs he was bringing to the sessions.

That's just how they sound, like well-oiled treble-armored vehicles built for bruising, driven with all hands on the wheel: "Takin' My Time," with its grinding-fuzz bridge; the heavy Yardbirds-style rave-up "I Should Have Known It"; the closer, "Good Enough," a compound storm of slow-blues Led Zeppelin and the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." "Love hit us hard/Like an overdue train," Petty drawls in the oceanic waltz "First Flash of Freedom," a setup for the real psychedelic wham of the exultant Jerry Garcia-joins-the-Allman Brothers guitars and the meaty, rippled sweep of Benmont Tench's organ break.

Petty surely didn't plan it that way, but Mojo arrives with instructive synchronicity, on the heels of the Rolling Stones' reissued Exile on Main Street. The records have a lot in common: the double-LP length and garage-comrade swing; the constant motion in the lyrics, out of trouble and blown chances toward something that, in the distance, looks like refuge. "I see with the eyes of somethin' wounded/Somethin' still standing after the storm," Petty sings over the dark gallop and skidding guitars in "Running Man's Bible."

But also like Exile, Mojo comes with a creeping grip in its rumble, sly, intuitive details that snag you at every pass, like Tench's raindrop accents on electric piano in the road-trip reverie "The Trip to Pirate's Cove" or the extra beat of smoldering silence before the chorus line in "Lover's Touch." You don't get that kind of cool with Pro Tools and Auto-Tune. It takes a great band, playing as one for the toughest audience in the world: itself.

David Fricke June 15, 2010
RollingStone.com



Mojo is the 12th studio album by American rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, released on June 15, 2010 on CD and June 29 on BD. It is Petty's first album with the Heartbreakers in eight years. Mojo debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200, selling 125,000 copies in its first week of release. The album is also the band's first full album with bassist Ron Blair since 1981's Hard Promises, as he only played on two tracks on the previous Heartbreakers album, The Last DJ.

In November 2009, Petty told Rolling Stone's David Fricke that it was his intention to record the album live in the studio without overdubs. He said of the album's tone, "It's blues-based. Some of the tunes are longer, more jammy kind of music. A couple of tracks really sound like the Allman Brothers — not the songs but the atmosphere of the band."

The album so far has a score of 72 out of 100 from Metacritic based on "generally favorable reviews". ChartAttack gave it a score of 2.5 out of five and said it was "an incredible disappointment" and "a record destined to be a cult hit 10 years from now, recognized as the band's most expansive and sonically adventurous disc. But expectations for Petty and his band are incredibly high, and from a contemporary standpoint, it comes off as lacking memorable hooks and choruses, something we all expect these guys to pull off in their sleep." The Independent, however, gave it all five stars and said "it's one of their very best efforts, as ought to be the case when a band plugs into the potency of raw R'n'B spirit. [...] It's such a perfect alliance of sentiment and setting that Muddy himself might have penned it." The Globe and Mail gave it three out of four stars and said, "The carefree Petty, at this stage of the game, isn't worried about hits. Like Big Bill Broonzy and others, he's found the key to the highway, and he's billed out and bound to go." Uncut gave it three out of five stars and said, "Unfortunately, and rather ironically, Mojo is ultimately undone by the very virtuosity of its creators: the band stumbles repeatedly into that musician's trap of making music that sounds intended principally to impress other musicians."

Wikipedia.org
 

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