Argent's "Lonely Hard Road"

This morning I listened to Argent's eponymous and debut album, and I noticed something about "Lonely Hard Road."  During the first half of the song, the backing vocals are panned to the right, but after the tempo change at about 2:39, when they appear again, they're panned to the left.  If those backing vocals are assumed to be static; their apparent shift from right to left is actually the movement of everything else to the right.  So between those shifting backing vocals and that tempo change, the singer/speaker seems to have made some progress in his walk.