Before the Drive-By Truckers wrote a concept album about “the duality of the Southern thing,” there was Southern Accents, a boldly personal work that Petty attributes to a delayed reaction to his beloved mother’s death; he told Bogdanovich “[Southern Accents] was the period when [my mother] found her way into the songs, and she brought her world with her.” The album might have been Petty’s greatest artistic achievement had he seen the idea through to its logical conclusion. Instead, Southern Accents sounds half-cocked and half-finished, padded with incompatible, inferior material. For every song like the Zevon-worthy title track or the gutsy “Dogs On The Run,” there’s a banal counterpart, like the silly “Spike,” or the electric sitar and drum machine non-starter “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” one of several of the album’s musical collaborations with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. The album also features at least one masterpiece in the form of “Rebels,” a mountainous rocker that challenges “Refugee” for the title of “best Tom Petty song ever,” but the song’s exceptional potency only serves to illuminate the fatigued, mediocre sound elsewhere on the album. In a promotional video for the album, Petty is already wondering if Southern Accents is too ambitious: “[Southern Accents] is the longest album I ever worked on. I don’t look forward to working on one this long again.” Why the poignant, melancholic “Trailer” was relegated to the B-side of the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” single remains a most frustrating Tom Petty mystery; had it been included over any of the stinkers on Southern Accents, it’d have gone a long way to redeeming this maddeningly uneven album.