Mojo 2XLP

Album Details

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 70s. 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. And 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 such recent freedom and experimentation to heart. The first thing that hits you about Mojo is that the spirit of the Mudcrutch sessions 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.

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.