During the last week of his life, Tom Petty grew unusually wistful. Home after a tour with the Heartbreakers, he had his wife, Dana, call up his rarely seen 2002 “Fun in the Desert” video, in which he tooled around a barren landscape on a mini-motorcycle, then asked her to track down a high school girlfriend on social media. “He hated Facebook,” Dana Petty recalls. “But he got super-nostalgic. Looking back, it’s very strange.”
Little from his musical past tugged at him more than Wildflowers, the 1994 solo album that contained some of his most intimate, relaxed, and revealing songs, from “You Don’t Know How It Feels” to the wispy title folk song. With the help of producer Rick Rubin, the album became one of Petty’s most beloved albums, selling more than 3 million copies at the time, as well as one of his most sonically expansive works. “He would always say, ‘That’s the best record we ever made,’” says Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. “It was a period when song after song was coming, which doesn’t always happen 20 years after your first release.”
When Petty first submitted the 25-track Wildflowers to Warner Bros., the label, including then-President Lenny Waronker, suggested he trim it back to one disc. As Petty told Rolling Stone in an unpublished interview from 2013, “Lenny listened to it and said, ‘It’s great, but it’s too long — you need to cut it down.’ We were like, ‘Oh, man, we wanted a double album.’ ” Petty acquiesced, relegating roughly half the album to his archives, although a few of the outtakes (“California,” “Hung Up and Overdue”) would end up on the soundtrack of the 1996 Edward Burns rom-com She’s the One.
Around 2012, in the midst of working on a new Heartbreakers album (Hypnotic Eye), Petty decided the time had come to finally release Wildflowers in its complete two-disc form. “We’re going to put out the songs from the other record as well,” he told RS excitedly. “We recorded quite a lot of songs and dug them out, and the songs are just so cool.”
Petty would never live to see his dream project through. In October 2017, he died from an accidental overdose of prescribed medications, including fentanyl. But on October 16th, three years after his passing, Petty’s wish will be fulfilled with a multidisc set, Wildflowers & All the Rest. As he had planned, it augments the original album with the excised songs, some in alternate versions from the ones heard on She’s the One. “I know he really wanted it to be finished,” says Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell. “And it felt good to do what he wanted and to follow through on his original idea.”
Deluxe configurations go even further: Separate discs are devoted to Petty’s homemade demos, live recordings of the Wildflowers songs, and alternate takes from the studio sessions. Akin to multi-disc sets accorded to classics like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Wildflowers & All the Rest allows listeners to see how one of Petty’s landmark records came together, nearly step by step. His daughter Adria Petty (who curated the collection along with Dana Petty, Campbell, Tench, and Adria’s sister Annakim Violette) says the set “helps you understand the magic of how my dad did something” in a way nothing else can. “I always thought they got together and maybe he had a certain amount of songs and presented them to Rick,” she says. “But that really wasn’t the process. It was this huge collaboration…a deliberate and very painstaking process to make these pure, simple recordings.”
And yet this project, which meant so much to Petty in his final years, almost didn’t happen. Before one of the most anticipated classic-rock releases in recent memory could become a reality, Petty’s surviving family had to get through a bitter court battle over his estate that came close to tearing them — and the Wildflowers project — apart. “Our world was…
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