Petty had long proven himself to be a writer of incisive economy - a rock ’n’ roll Hemingway in tinted shades. In the respite after the Heartbreakers released the Lynne-produced “Into the Great Wide Open” in 1991, Petty entered the most searching and fertile creative period of his career. And there were all sorts of intrusive memories that he’d been trying to bat away since leaving Florida, of a childhood with a sick, saintly mother and an abusive father whose version of Southern masculinity he could never quite live up to. (His wife, Jane Benyo, had been with him since “the age of 17” - a fact that Petty’s friend Stevie Nicks had once misheard because of Benyo’s Florida accent you can fill in the rest of the story from there.) Petty’s stormy relationship with the Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch was threatening the band’s future. Instead, it became his biggest seller yet.Īnd yet Petty was, throughout all the ostensible highs, outrunning some internal demons that overtook him the minute he slowed down. His record label almost didn’t put it out because it didn’t think it was commercially viable, despite its first two tracks being “Free Fallin’” (!) and “I Won’t Back Down” (!!). He and Lynne had also recently recorded “Full Moon Fever” (1989), Petty’s first solo album, which they captured quickly with charmed and refreshing ease.
(There are also 14 more home recordings, a live album, a disc of alternate takes and unreleased recordings of the 10 other tracks that would have made the cut had “Wildflowers” become the double album that Petty, who died in 2017, initially intended.) In a murmured vocal, Petty sounds like a man fumbling for a light switch and never quite finding it, though a quick flash of luminescence brings a lyric that expresses something simple and true: “Far away from your trouble and worry,” he sings in his tender drawl, “You belong somewhere you feel free.”īy the late ’80s, and his late 30s, Petty had not only met his heroes (Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne) but formed a band with them, the Traveling Wilburys. The extraordinary new collection “ Wildflowers & All the Rest” lets listeners experience that mystical, intimate moment: The first home-recorded demo of “Wildflowers” is among the five-disc release’s many spoils.
“I swear to God, it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he later told the writer Paul Zollo of the title track from his melancholic and masterful second solo album, “Wildflowers.” “I turned on my tape-recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish.” One day in 1993, Tom Petty opened his mouth, and a new song came out, fully formed.
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