Note: This Random Weekend SOTD was scheduled to run this Sunday. When I heard the awful news of his passing, I decided to move it up a week. I’ll give the man a proper remembrance at some point, but for now I’ll just run this blog entry untouched. I will say, this particular song selection is quite poignant in light of the news.
Here’s a lovely Random Weekend selection from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 2010 album Mojo. It’s a great album that I rarely revisit, but should.
Wrapping up my three-week Tom Petty series is his most recent album with The Heartbreakers, 2010’s Mojo. But first, an aside.
In 2006, Petty released a self-titled album with Mudcrutch — a band made up of Petty, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and former collaborators Randall Marsh and Tom Leadon. The five men formed Mudcrutch in Gainesville, Florida, in 1970 but disbanded before recording a studio album.
Best Songs of 2010 – #10
OK, with the honorable mentions out of the way I now move on to my official top ten songs of 2010. I’ll count down ten through six this week and five through one next week, with an Elvis Costello weekend in between.
This list usually proves controversial so I’ll lay down the ground rules up front in hopes of preventing complaints down the road.
This is not a list of the best singles of the year… many of these songs were never released apart from the albums that contain them. This is not a list of songs that made a huge impact on radio or captured the cultural zeitgeist in 2010… I featured many of those tracks during my summer song series and that will have to do.
Some artists bounce back and forth between solo albums and albums with “the band,” and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You can usually, but not always, tell when Bruce Springsteen is on his own or backed with the E-Street Band. Elvis Costello’s albums sound pretty much the same whether or not he credits The Attractions (or The Impostors) or headlines his albums himself.
Tom Petty with or without The Heartbreakers has always struck me as pretty much the same thing. Quick, Into the Great Wide Open… solo or Heartbreakers? Southern Accents? Full Moon Fever? Highway Companion? Wildflowers? The first two were Heartbreakers albums, the rest solo. But the style on all of them is pretty much interchangeable (not least because Petty tends to use the same musicians even when he goes “solo”).
Meet Me In Montauk 