Long After Dark

About

Six year, five album, a seemingly constant cycle of tours: By the time <i>Long After Dark</i> arrived in 1982, the Heartbreakers had been running like a machine for year. Still, change was inevitable, and Petty’s sixth album would find the group at several turning points: Bassist Ron Blair departed, with Howie Epstein sliding in as his replacement. MTV, meanwhile, was increasingly becoming the best way to reach listener. For a band defined, on some existential level, by a resistance to the fickle winds of fashion in favor of tradition and nostalgia, the group’s hit video for “You Got Lucky”—a post-apocalyptic renegade scene inspired by <i>Mad Max</i>—was proof that Petty and his Heartbreakers were also open to new creative challenge. Then again, maybe the video era wasn’t as much of a shift as it seemed: As Petty later said, MTV wasn’t so much a scrappy new TV channel as it was a giant radio station. And while <i>Long After Dark</i> at times promised the group into shiny new territory, it mostly served to strengthen and reaffirm what had already become an instantly recognizable sound: “You Got Lucky” worked off the back-alley dramas of “Breakdown” and “Refugee”; “Change of Heart” was in line with “The Waiting” and “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and so on. And while a love song like “Straight Into Darkness” was understandably darker than some of the Heartbreakers’ earlier relationship tales—after all, they were now in their early thirties—<i>Long After Dark</i> is mostly an exercise in holding the rein. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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