(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
Tue 13 May 2025 18:00, UK
As 1994 rolled by, southern heartland rocker Tom Petty was enjoying a career rejuvenation and semi-comeback. While never quite hitting commercial doldrums, his classic output with The Heartbreakers was certainly past its heyday and was keeping himself afloat with a string of successful tours over new, indispensable material across the mid-1980s.
Entering a renewed era of attention with his membership of The Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup boasting Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, and Jeff Lynne, Petty’s following solo debut, Full Moon Fever, launched the Florida songsmith to a second chapter of his career. A majority of it was down to the mammoth success of ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ and ‘Free Fallin’’.
Continuing his creative rebound with 1991’s Into the Great Wide Open, Petty had established himself as an elder statesman of roots rock barely 15 years after he’d first entered the charts. Deciding to cut another solo record, Petty embraced the unreined artistic freedom that came with the new disregard for in-band consensus and found a resulting songwriting purple patch, writing over 25 songs with the shared production nurturing of Def Jam guru Rick Rubin.
Penning enough for a double album but whittling the record down to a conventional length due to label pressure, 1994’s Wildflowers won praise for its gentle folk musings of age and the passage of time, peaking at number eight on the Billboard 200. While never released as a single, the album’s opening title track would endure as a much-loved fan favourite and semi-frequent staple at his subsequent live shows. Despite its popularity, ‘Wildflowers’ was one of Petty’s most effortless numbers to dream up.
“I just took a deep breath and it came out,” he told Performing Songwriter in 2014. “The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it”.
He added: “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
It’s an impressive feat. Lyrically imbued with an ambiguity as to who exactly “belongs among the wildflowers”, the multitudinous approach to ‘Wildflowers’ presents an intriguing array of possibilities, from a past lover, a young child, or perhaps a spiritual communiqué with a higher power. Whatever it is, Petty deftly colours the humble country folk piece with an authentic connection to the natural balance around him, a green-fingered elemental number that shines in his heartland repertoire.
The simplicity of ‘Wildflowers’ creation came to light several years after his death with 2020’s Wildflowers & All the Rest, a reissue packed with demos, outtakes and extended material from the recording sessions that didn’t make the final cut. Standing as a promo of sorts was the initial home recording of ‘Wildflower’, still charged with a gentle energy that could have made the final album in its unpolished form.
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