Tom Petty’s Lost Treasures
After a legal battle, the late singer’s family and bandmates finally share ‘Wildflowers’ the way he wanted it to be heard
After a legal battle, the late singer’s family and bandmates finally share Wildflowers the way he wanted it to be heard.
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, 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 and 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 25track 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 As Petty told Rolling Stone in an unpublished interview from 2013, “Lenny listened to it and said, ‘It’s great, but it’s too long — you need to cut it down.’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 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, Petty decided the time had come to finally release Wildflowers in its complete two-disc form. “We recorded quite a lot of songs and dug them out,” he told Rolling Stone excitedly, “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 this month, three years after his death, 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; deluxe configurations go further, with discs devoted to Petty’s homemade demos, live recordings, and alternate takes from the studio sessions. “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.”
But it almost didn’t happen. Before one of the most anticipated classicrock 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 turned upside down, and it did some damage,” says Dana. “We got through it somehow. . . . But I don’t recommend it to anyone.”
When petty began working on Wildflowers in 1992, he had reason to feel stressed. His marriage to his first wife, Jane, was collapsing; Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein was battling drug addiction; and tension had developed between Petty and drummer Stan Lynch.
But Petty was ready to work, meeting Rubin at an L.A. studio at the same