1/3/2024 0 Comments Wildflowers tom petty![]() Like the album itself, these recordings are fascinating, fun, and sometimes unsettlingly intimate. 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. 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. 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. 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. Of course, even before this collection, Wildflowers was overwhelming by design. 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). 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. Then there’s Home Recordings, which compiles Petty’s intimate solo demos from the era. 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. Three years after his death, we have Wildflowers & All the Rest, the immersive collection Petty had in mind, curated by his family and bandmates. In the last years of Petty’s life, he spoke optimistically about revisiting the material for a box set and maybe a tour. In later conversations with Rubin, he admitted to feeling slightly intimidated: not sure he could ever top it, uncertain where it came from. ![]() The further that Tom Petty got from Wildflowers, the more admiration he felt for it, and the less he understood it. It goes triple platinum and many considered it his masterpiece. Wildflowers is released that fall 15 tracks, 63 minutes. 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. It’s amazing, the label says, but it’s too long.
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