Imagine the scene: It’s 1994 and Tom Petty is presenting his new solo album Wildflowers to the suits at Warner Bros. He’s been working on this music for two years with a new collaborator, producer Rick Rubin, and he is excited. He presses play. The first thing you hear is the title track, which sounds like a folk standard. Next, you hear “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” with its booming drums and wrecking ball of a chorus; it sounds like a hit single. Then you hear 23 more songs.
Somehow, the artist sitting across the table—43 years old; a friend and collaborator of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Johnny Cash; an artist who has spent his decades-long career demanding control over everything with his name on it, right down to the price of his albums—agrees. Wildflowers is released that fall; 15 tracks, 63 minutes. It goes triple platinum and many considered it his masterpiece.
The further that Tom Petty got from Wildflowers, the more admiration he felt for it, and the less he understood it. In later conversations with Rubin, he admitted to feeling slightly intimidated: not sure he could ever top it, uncertain where it came from. In the last years of Petty’s life, he spoke optimistically about revisiting the material for a box set and maybe a tour. It was the next thing on his list.
Three years after his death, we have Wildflowers & All the Rest, the immersive collection Petty had in mind, curated by his family and bandmates. It includes, along with the album itself, finally back on vinyl, All the Rest: a 10-song set of outtakes, forming a solid studio album that Petty considered releasing under the name Wildflowers 2. Then there’s Home Recordings, which compiles Petty’s intimate solo demos from the era. Next is Live Wildflowers, a thrilling collection that shows how audiences around the world received this material on stage over the span of two decades. And finally, there’s Alternative Versions (Finding Wallflowers), where you hear Petty and his bandmates experiment with the songs in the studio: a set of performances notable for their minor variations in lyrics and arrangement (and, in one instance, because Ringo Starr is playing drums).
It is a lot to take in. Of course, even before this collection, Wildflowers was overwhelming by design. There are classic albums that feel carved in stone, where every note seems purposeful in communicating a point: your Born to Run’s or Blue’s or Petty’s own Damn the Torpedoes. And then there are albums like this, where the messiness is the point: you come to hear an artist indulge in whatever spirit strikes them in the studio that day. It’s the type of album where one song might be a hopeless acoustic ballad inspired by John Fahey, but the song directly before it might involve goofy non sequiturs about sex while someone rips a guitar solo.
It’s a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes this box set feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. Like the album itself, these recordings are fascinating, fun, and sometimes unsettlingly intimate. “Don’t Fade on Me,” the aforementioned Fahey-inspired ballad, is presented in an early solo rendition where you learn that Petty’s lyrics about a failing romantic relationship actually started as a desperate intervention from a guitarist to a bassist. (It is particularly unnerving considering Howie Epstein, the bassist in Petty’s own band, the Heartbreakers, was struggling with heroin addiction that would take his life less than 10 years later.)
More than any of Petty’s albums, Wildflowers is driven with autobiographical intensity. It’s telling that even in the earliest forms of these songs, he accompanied himself with harmony vocals and 12-string guitar and piano, as if he wanted to make sure even these versions would sound good blasting from a car radio. And yet, the music is filled with details about addiction and divorce (Petty and his first wife Jane separated a year after the album’s release). An outtake called “Harry Green” is a hushed acoustic song about a high school outcast who befriended Petty back in Florida and died by suicide. He is one of many ghosts who haunts this music, even if the song itself may have felt too confessional to include.
The other outtakes are less revealing but often remarkable: “Leave Virginia Alone” has a chorus so romantic and sugar-sweet that Petty ended up lending the song to Rod Stewart. “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” is present only on the Home Recordings set, and it’s a fine addition to Petty’s legacy of gorgeous, stoned lullabies. In the liner notes, bandmate Benmont Tench notes that this release marks his first time hearing the song; he confirms this by noting that, had he heard it earlier, he would have demanded they record it.
Because each component of the set feels like its own carefully constructed album, it avoids the historical aura of something like Dylan’s Cutting Edge set—where entire studio sessions were presented with incomplete takes and banter. Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part. On the live set, two outtakes find definitive versions: the riotous “Drivin’ Down to Georgia,” where the Heartbreakers explode in the way they only could with an audience cheering them on. And then there’s “Girl on LSD,” a goofy B-side that Petty can barely get through without cracking himself up. “I’m sorry about that,” he deadpans as the audience roars. “I don’t know what happened to me there.”
This lightness sustains the set. Take the Home Recordings version of “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” a moodier take on a road trip classic, complete with several discarded lines. “Most things that I worry ’bout/Never happen anyway,“ he sings in a whisper, drawling the syllables through its now-familiar, seesawing melody. Listening to all the bonus discs, it’s a lyric you will hear him try to work into multiple songs. It becomes a kind of mantra, a way to check his anxiety and turn it into something lighter, something you can sing along with. For those of us who have always listened to Tom Petty for this reason, there is comfort in knowing you can turn to Wildflowers. And now, you can live in it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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