- The retrospective feel of the album is one of looking to the past for the sake of self-preservation in the present, along lines discussed by Nietzsche.
The theme of fighting or not wanting to has an especially strong echo, showing up in “Swingin’,” “Billy the Kid” and “I Don’t Wanna Fight.” These songs, in turn, exhibit nostalgia for past icons, with protagonists going down hard like Billy the Kid or going down swinging like Sonny Liston or again like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Sammy Davis in a punny reference to the swing era. - The crisis that Petty was experiencing echoes throughout the album in more specific ways, with many songs repeating the theme of being up or down, high or low. He was also a seminal figure in Southern rock, with its emphatically nostalgic character. Throughout his career, he made music steeped in past rock traditions. At the same time, all of this typifies Petty’s oeuvre. The lyrics, straight-laced drums and layered drones of electric guitars of “Free Girl Now” go back further to “American Girl,” which itself was influenced by psychedelic music. “I Don’t Wanna Fight”-a Heartbreakers performance composed and sung by Mike Campbell-returns to the hard driving rock of Damn the Torpedoes.
The production qualities and lyrics of “Rhino Skin” recollect “Asshole,” a Beck cover from Petty’s previous album. “Accused of Love” similarly contains echoes of Petty’s more upbeat work, but with depressing lyrical undertones. The sprightly mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the backing vocal harmonies and the stories of loss in songs such as “Won’t Last Long” and “This One’s for Me” harken to Petty’s albums from the late 80s to mid-90s. - While melancholically creative, the album might be regarded as an echoing of past musical fragments. ) solidity in the past or just out of exhausted inability to cope with the present. So too does the tendency to look backwards in times of crisis, whether in hopes of finding (. The thoughtfulness and self-reflection that traumatic circumstances spur distinguish the album. Petty filmed no videos, avoided playing the album’s songs on the follow-up tour and reported little memory of its making. The album Echo was produced in a depressed, drug-riddled phase when Tom Petty’s first marriage was ending and his physical condition so degraded that he took to using a cane. I propose the following explanation for the new asymmetry: we are willing to accept testimony about whether a work merits being found beautiful but we are unwilling to accept testimony about whether something actually is beautiful. I suggest that we look further afield, and that something like a sensibility theory, in the style of John McDowell and David Wiggins, will prove to be the best fit for our intuitions for the usability of aesthetic testimony. These new cases weigh against a number of standing theories of aesthetic testimony. The switch in intuitive acceptability seems to track, in some complicated way, the line between public life and private life. Consider the following cases: we seem unwilling to accept somebody hanging a painting in their bedroom based merely on testimony, but entirely willing to accept hanging a painting in a museum based merely on testimony. I consider a new asymmetry in the usability aesthetic testimony. ) for action, but unusable for doxastic repetition. But this cannot simply be explained by supposing that testimony is usable (. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimony. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition - where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification.