Petty, who was approaching both his mid-forties and a divorce, offers little hollow bravado on this front. It also stands as something of a classic of the midlife crisis genre. He recorded Petty (and, to all intents and purposes, the Heartbreakers) live in the studio, and Wildflowers sounds it. Wildflowers was produced by Rick Rubin, who – though he later acknowledged admiring Full Moon Fever to the point of obsession – seemed to get that Petty’s rough edges were his most appealing traits. Petty’s previous solo album, 1989’s Full Moon Fever, had seen production substantially handled by ELO’s Jeff Lynne, one of a procession of relatively genteel British foils – Dave Stewart, George Harrison et al – Petty sought throughout his career, in the manner of an anxious colonial worried that his rough edges would be frowned upon by the aristocracy. On its own merits, the 15-track version of Wildflowers holds up well. It may have been the heedless profligacy often witnessed in people who know they have tapped a rich seam, but a lot of extraordinary material was left lying about. What the 25-track edition makes thrillingly and bafflingly clear, however, is that it was less than it might have been. Give or take the saxophone section and pedal steel on “House In The Woods”, a few guest sessioneers and a couple of celebrity cameos ( Ringo Starr plays drums on “To Find A Friend”, Carl Wilson sings along on “Honey Bee”), Wildflowers is a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album in all but name.īy that exacting standard, Wildflowers is a very good Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album. All of the Heartbreakers appear thoughout, aside from recently departed drummer Stan Lynch, replaced by Steve Ferrone, who would be formally inducted into the group in short order. Wildflowers was billed as a solo album, but this seemed a hair-splitting distinction. The entry-level version of this reissue is that aborted 25-track double, scaling up to a 5CD Super-Deluxe edition that includes the extended Wildflowers plus contemporary studio outtakes, home demos, alternative studio cuts and live recordings, some of them previously unreleased. Wildflowers, similarly, was originally sketched as a 25-song double album, before being trimmed, at the suggestion of a nervous record label, to a nevertheless generous 15. The finished product was certainly far from bad, but it was nevertheless also a stretch from where Petty had once envisioned it taking him, and his listeners. A decade or so earlier, Petty had set about Southern Accents, intended as a double-album state of the nation address surveying the Deep South, commemorating its music and contemplating its contradictions. Wildflowers was not the first Tom Petty album to have had its initial ambitions thwarted somewhat between conception and release.
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