Listen to contributing editor Neil Strauss' interview with Tom Petty in his Malibu home.

It is a high-security situation at the Sony Studios lot. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are in Los Angeles winding up their penultimate rehearsal for what Petty says will be the band's last all-out tour. And the only outsider they've allowed in is the legendary director Peter Bogdanovich and his crew, who have been recording the band's every breath for a forthcoming documentary. Each song Petty plays -- from old Fleetwood Mac covers to his new ballad "Square One" -- elicits a flurry of excitement from Bogdanovich, who instantly starts asking what song it is, comparing it to earlier rehearsals and figuring out what camera coverage he has on it.

When the rehearsal ends, Petty looks around the studio, lost and out of place, until his eyes fix on his free-spirited blond wife, Dana. She presses against him, his face fills with life, and the two merge into one self-contained suede-fringed being for the rest of the evening.

And that is when his new solo CD, Highway Companion, snaps into focus. It is Petty's first new solo album in twelve years, and it has been four years since he has released an album with the Heartbreakers, who are celebrating thirty years together.

Nearly all the characters on Highway Companion are on the run -- by land, sea and air. But unlike a Bruce Springsteen album, where the open road represents freedom from the dream-crushing traps and responsibilities of growing older, Petty, 55, catches up with these characters years later, when they're disillusioned by this freedom. As he sings on the new album, "Living free is gaining on me." The characters are bored and lonely, adrift in nothingness, yearning to return to the anchors of home, family and love, but not even knowing if they're still waiting for them or not.

In his own life, Petty finally seems to have set anchor after a long drift. The turn of the century was not kind to him. In the late Nineties, he separated from his longtime wife and disappeared hermitlike into a chicken shack, where many of his friends worried he was doing heroin. In that time, he battled clinical depression and released one of his worst-performing albums, Echo. He bounced back in 2001, moving to Malibu and marrying Dana York. His 2002 album The Last DJ, a rock-opera condemnation of the state of the music business, did little to ingratiate himself with the cultural gatekeepers he has spent most of his career fighting (in 1981, he went to war with MCA over the label's plan to issue the follow-up to Damn the Torpedoes for $9.98, a dollar above the then-standard list price, and won -- he celebrated on the cover of Rolling Stone with a shot of him tearing a dollar in half). And in 2003, Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein, who had been fired from the band a year earlier, died of a heroin overdose.

A few days after the rehearsal, Petty sits in his Malibu home on a warm summer afternoon, wearing his ever-present brown suede-fringed jacket and matching moccasins with black socks. Though from a distance he looks like he hasn't changed in a quarter of a century, up close his face displays the deep lines of experience. Only his pale-blue eyes (which rarely make direct contact with the person sitting opposite) and his sporadic guilty smile betray a childish energy. Every few minutes, he arches his back like a cat, extends his arms into the air as far as they will go and stretches his bones. He then freezes in that position for several awkward seconds, occasionally dropping his cigarette to the floor.

Often the best interviews are given by the musicians who avoid them the most, like Bruce Springsteen or Eric Clapton. And often one of the reasons they don't like to sit down for an interview is because they are too honest and sincere in these types of interactions, unwilling to go into autopilot and parrot the same answers they've given before. This is true of Petty, who keeps extending the interview well past its appointed deadline.

"This is it for me," Petty says as he takes a sip from a mug of old, cold coffee. "This is the last interview I am doing for a long time."

These are strange words coming from Petty, because he's done hardly any interviews in the past year. And the CD that he is supposed to be promoting not only hasn't been released yet, he hasn't finished mastering it or sequencing it. In fact, though the record is coming out on July 25th, when we speak in early June he hasn't even turned it in to his label yet.

But Petty is not like other artists. When asked if he'd prefer instead to disappear from the public eye like legendary recluses Sly Stone or Captain Beefheart, he goes silent for a moment, then nods his head softly. "Yeah," he admits. "I can see myself that way very easily."