Yesterday's Sonic Landscape, Today and Tomorrow: Tom Petty, T Bone Burnett

When Tom Petty died in October '17 I figured a career retrospective was likely in the pipeline. All the old hits remastered to please the fading ears of boomers like myself — even though I do not consider myself a fan, this was a proposition I could buy into. So I did. And this week I received my first Tom Petty CD.

Two of 'em, actually.

Rolling Stone claims Petty has 50 great songs, but I found 38 to be about right for a project like this. He doesn't wear out his welcome after two CDs and Petty's late-career wistfulness sets a fitting, elegiac tone that washes over the whole thing and settles it nicely. Cameron Crowe submits a gloss with a few choice quotes that is sufficient unto the day (I wish Mikal Gilmore had been given the assignment, but oh well). As for the re-mastering...

It is a relief to have sound-files as fat with distinction as the current technology allows. But it is an incredibly bright sound. I guess boomer ears all fade differently — Donald Fagen, a notorious audiophile, prefers to release his current stuff to this particular standard as well, so it can't be hitting everyone's ears as unpleasantly as it hits mine. For me the effect is somewhat akin to hearing a child play the triangle — a little aural distance becomes a highly coveted quality.

At home, when I'm wearing the expensive, bulky headphones I can tweak things until they sound better. In the car, not so much. So it goes.

*****

T Bone Burnett is infamously tetchy about sound, and I'm wondering if his ears aren't fading in the same direction mine are.

Burnett's Facebook profile (Just kidding, just kidding...)

Back when he re-recorded a bunch of material from Proof Through The Night I wasn't sure I saw the point of it. But I recently made a playlist that juxtaposed the original Proof songs with the re-recordings. Played back-to-back, and hitting ears that have been assaulted for nearly 55 years, I found I generally preferred the more recent versions.

Anyway, in a terrific interview he recently gave to CBC's Tom Power, Burnett claims he's spent his life trying to recapture the sounds he heard in the Skyliner Ballroom in Fort Worth TX, back in the early '60s. I can hear that, and — because it's not unbearably bright and tingly — I can also really dig it. The full interview, with tonnes of juicy reminiscences and soundclips, can be streamed here or downloaded here. And he's got a new album of original material — The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space — coming out April 12. Spring cannot come fast enough.