“Tom left us a vast songbook which is forever expansive with poignancy, power, and purity. It's a source that is never depleted, which we can all return to for sustenance through the rest of our days, because it can take rhino skin (as he wrote) to get through this world unhurt. However, having his soul, spirit, and love injected into these songs sure helps a lot. His songbook now lives in the unbound mystic, like an entire America, coast to coast, of wildflowers.” - Paul Zollo, 2017
To be a songwriter, in some ways, to lay your scars before the world and allow your wounds to be the beginnings of others healing, plant flowers in the bones of everyone in hopes that it helps the same growth happen within you. In 1994, rock music was different, and close to dead. On the first of November Tom Petty released what would become his most enduring album of his career: a 15 track acoustic, lyric heavy analysis of his psyche over two years of constant change of everything he'd come to know. It gave rock radio some of the biggest hits of the year, and reintroduced Petty as a songwriter as opposed to a rock and roll revivalist. If rock wasn’t going to die, it was sure going to change. It was growing up. Examining change and youth from a different angle then a rock and roll is used to is what set Wildflowers apart, it was the moments between the lines of teenage rebellion that helped the piece thrive. Writer Emma Forrest wrote in her 1994 NME review for the album, “It’s an album that helps you sort your thoughts without interrupting them - just as significant as any furious paean to disgruntled youth. Get over teen angst. Wildflowers is the soundtrack for people who felt they were experiencing their mid-life crisis at 14.” Petty was a devout follower of what he considered the classic rock and roll sound: short songs, good instrumentation, and a certain degree of professionalism that was being lost more and more every year since 1970. He was popular with an older generation for being the last great, true rock and roll star in their eyes, and he was popular with the MTV generation for always being one of the most experimental video darlings of the decade, he occupied something no rock star before him was able to. In ways, he was always the fish out of water in rock music: too young to be classic but too old to be new wave. 1994 found rock in the same limbo Petty had always been in, nobody seemed to fit much of anywhere. Suddenly the Stones were too old to have a hit and Oasis was too young to be taken seriously. Grunge seemed to die in April with Kurt Cobain. There was no where anyone fit, the boxes that worked so long were beginning to show the flaw of their existence, everyone was a Petty. Being the poster-child for the intersection of old school and new school, Petty was able to create an album that didn't get caught up in any of the superficial nonsense of decade: examining the very youthful fear of change with the maturity one can only gain with experience.
"He was probably one of the greatest rock artists of all time because he had the ability to sound the same but never sound dated, and his songs always sounded good. When you go back in time and listen to the old songs they still sound modern, and they never changed. Like a great artist he didn't change his style that much, but what he put out was pure quality." - Elton John, 2017
Petty approached Wildflowers the same as he approached his other albums: looking to his heroes for the blueprint. You had the Neil Young-esque acoustic stylings, invoking the thoughts of albums like Harvest and Comes a Time, the large ideas explored over simplistic
instrumentation. There was the Joni Mitchell Blue influence: heartbreak written with no punches pulled, examining the life of the narrator as opposed to the emotion at large. The Stones and Exile, the creation of a bones and all album in a time when production was reaching creative heights. Feeling every voice crack, the plucking of each string of the guitar, humanity seeping through what feels like an untouched emotional exploration of a specific time and place. Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is the easiest album to connect Wildflowers to, non-linear stories making up an album that watches its writer piece together his own heartbreak as it happens. Dylan and Petty had collaborated more than a few times leading up to 1994, between the two Traveling Wilburys albums, their co-headlining 1986 tour and an appearance at 1985's Farm Aid. Compile all these together, and you get what becomes one of the most quintessentially Tom Petty albums he ever made. Wildflowers was created over an 18 month period, sessions lead by producer Rick Rubin. Rubin was newer to the scene, previous credits including many of the great names of 80s hip-hop including Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, and had been looking to work with Petty since hearing 1989’s Full Moon Fever. Petty spoke very highly of Rubin, saying in 1994 about his decison to chose him as producer: “Rick Rubin - Rick loves music, that’s really why I decided to work with him. It’s not because of
his technical skill - he has no musical skill, he plays no instrument [..] He just loves music. He’s not a corporate man.” Rubin has a more hands-off appraoch to his production style, hence the wide range of genres and artists, where he goes off feeling. He had said in 1994 while recording with Petty, “What I have to offer is as a fan. I can come in and say what I like and what I don’t like, and I don't necessarily know why, just kind of being true to my own taste and really try to steer it in a direction that feels natural and good to me.” The band also enjoyed working with Rubin, citing his style as natural and Petty specifically complimenting Rubin on his ability to understand his vision. Full Moon Fever had been produced by ELO’s Jeff Lynne, who Petty met through George Harrison and the Wilburys, Fever went on to become Petty’s first of three solo LPs. Lynne produced the Heartbreakers next LP, Into the Great Wide Open, to mixed reviews from the Heartbreakers. The band had been together since 1976, and while Petty was the leader, the band were given more than their fair share of creative control over their pieces, which had started to slow since their work with Lynne. Lynne’s creative process was more in line with he’d do it if he could, which pianist Benmont Tench was not enthused about. He complained of the sessions comprising Into the Great Wide Open, feeling like he was barely a part of the process. Tench had a reputation within the band of being outspoken, always speaking his mind when he did or did not like how things were going, and this was no exception. Stan Lynch, the Heartbreakers drummer, also had this habit, though was less constructive than Tench. Lynch had started to talk behind Petty’s back about how he didn’t like the direction the band was going, how he wasn’t excited about the material, and telling other bands he wasn’t tied down to any particular band. The stress of Lynch’s constant back and forth of to be and not to be weighed heavy on an already suffering Petty, leading to him being fired from the band shortly after the Wildflowers sessions started. Petty said of Lynch at the time, “When we were gonna do Wildflowers, I remember going through some of the songs with the Heartbreakers. And it wasn’t really that great. And Stan said to Mike [Campbell, Heartbreakers guitarist] later that he didn’t like the material. He thought the material was too laid back, and didn’t think it was what we should be doing. I think that hurt me." Petty had already decided he wanted the album to be a solo record, that he wanted to create a different sound than was typical of the Heartbreakers sound, he didn't want to pigeonhole his band to just work behind him with no input. When Wildflowers sessions started, Mike Campbell was already part of the band put together. Campbell had worked on every Petty project except the Wilburys so his inclusion was a given, and pianist Benmont Tench. Tench was also apart of almost every Petty project, and had known producer Rick Rubin from their
work together on Mick Jagger's 1993 album Wandering Spirit, and was who requested that Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein was brought onto the sessions. The band was now faced with their lack of a drummer, opting to use the sessions as a try-outs for the position. It was Campbell who suggested drummer Steve Ferrone, whom he'd met at a George Harrison show while filling in for Eric Clapton. Ferrone had been recording since 1974, working with Bloodstone, Average White Band, Chaka Khan, Duran Duran, and was even part of the Saturday Night Live house band. He auditioned, and became the drummer for not only Wildflowers but the Heartbreakers, making the album a true band album despite Petty's previous reservations of having the band on the album. On top of the departure of Stan Lynch, Petty had just left label MCA, with whom he butted heads with many a-time, for Warner Brothers, and was still grappling with many other outstanding issues: his house being burned down, the death of Roy Orbison, the band being unhappy with his production choices, and his marriage of 20 years failing. Petty was in a place of extreme change, change that would fuel the general theme and creation of the album. Petty’s words created a place where one could connect to their emotions, especially the man himself. Wildflowers is a deeply personal album, almost like pages ripped right from the diary of a man who was going through the worst space of his life.
You belong somewhere you feel free is, in many ways, the thesis of the entire album. The title track begins the album with an almost absent minded prophetic scripture. It’s simple from beginning to end, Petty said in 2014 of writing the song: "I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it. 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 realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.” Petty had stated of himself at points that he was neurotic, a perfectionist whose demeanor of a stoned out artist couldn’t be further from who he was. Breaking his hand while recording Southern Accents is the antithesis of this fact of Petty, how he’d nonchalantly state it in interviews despite the fact he had to relearn how to play guitar due to the severity of the damage. For a song like Wildflowers, for him to accept something as good the first time and do little to fix it up is a point of change for him. There was something about Petty that seemed as if he couldn’t accept he was as good as he was, how he’d not release a song unless he considered it an “A” song, and kept all “B” songs to himself until he could perfect them to his liking, or his admission that he rarely listened to his music and would often write off large portions of his career because of his harsh judgment of his own work. Petty spoke of the track in 1994, saying “Wildflowers,
it’s probably just for people you love, you know? People you care about, how you wish them well. And that song came to me, it’s one of the only times that ever happened to me in my life, I really just stepped up in my little studio at home, and I put the mic on and played the whole song from top to bottom, all the lyrics and all the music in one go. And then I stopped the tape and played it back, and I was really kind of confused. I kept playing it again and again thinking, ‘Well, what do we work on - what do we change?’ But then I thought, ‘I’m not going to change it, I’m just going to leave it exactly,” Benmont Tench stated that while he always knew Petty was a phenomenal writer, Wildflowers stood out amongst a catalog of great songs. The song has much more going on then it seemes upon the surface, Rick Rubin spoke of this in 2021 for the documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, saying that the tightness of all the moving parts in the song is what makes it so much more compelling than it may seem at first glance. How the first listen it sounds like just Petty and his guitar but the more and more you listen you realize all the other instruments and how well they fit together with Petty acoustic guitar and Tench’s piano part.
The music video for Wildflowers
"That guy [the protagonist] is pretty down. He's out for an adventure." is how Petty chose to speak of You Don't Know How It Feels when asked in a 2007 discussion with author Paul Zollo. The song follows a man, seeming down on his luck, as he lists all the things he wants to and can do. There's someone I used to see / But she doesn't give a damn for me / Let’s get to the point, let’s roll another joint / Turn the radio loud, I’m too alone to be proud / You don’t know how it feels to be me. The song can largely be credited as a stoners anthem, and probably the reason that people who knew nothing about Tom Petty would have figured him to be a massive pothead, but more interestingly, the song is structured as the narrator finally dwelling on negative instances before becoming sidetracked to the next idea or thing. My old man was born to rock, he’s still trying to beat the clock / Think of me what you will, I’ve got a little time to kill / Let’s get to the point, let’s roll another joint. The song plays out a subtly passive piece, while never really addressing much of anything or revealing too much, the title and chorus reveal the first sprinkling of anger in the album. It’s not explosive, nor mean, not even defensive, it’s like a shake off of all the advice that could be given as to how to deal with something, a simple shrug with a gentle let down, You don’t know how it feels, no / You don’t know how it feels to be me. The Heartbreakers new drummer, Steve Ferrone, said the song was different from any other of the bands hits, written in a way Petty had never approached his more commercial work. Mike Campbell said the song came from the worry there was no single on the album - and when asked what he thought of as a hit song gave the example of Steve Miller Band’s The Joker. The song was largely written from that jumping off point of Steve Miller, very melodic and a departure from Petty’s normally electric guitar driven radio rock. The music video finds Petty, with just his guitar and harmonica, standing still in the center of a rapidly spinning world, obscuring his face with a hat until he begins singing. As he stands still, singing about how he longs to just roll another joint, the world around him is overrun by chaos: a wrecking ball smashes through houses, the banker is seen engaging in an affair with his secretary, a literal circus is seen performing as he stares down the barrel of the camera, You don’t know, no, you don’t know what it feels like to me. It isn’t until the instrumental break that the true insanity
unfolding in the background is unobscured: the bank being robbed, a shoot out, a man watering children dressed as flowers. Petty comes back in focus, but a singer takes the microphone from him, singing the verse before Petty pops back in frame to finish the song. At the end, he walks away, finally looking around as the camera focuses in on the unattended microphone. By Tom Petty standards, this was a largely unimpressive video. Winning the Video Vanguard Award the same year for his contributions to the art of music video, this seemed to be scaled back. From the western-space hybrid of You Got Lucky to the thought-provoking Mary Jane’s Last Dance, or the seven-minute long victory lap of Into the Great Wide Open, it was odd to see him just standing in a hoodie as he sang to the microphone. It had been a decade since a video like that had come from Petty, but there’s a commentary about the album wrapped in what seemed to be a lack-luster video from the outside. As the world falls apart around him, he doesn’t notice, wrapped too much in his own mentality of wanting to be left alone. Petty remains unaffected as the world around him crumbles, going with the flow until walking away at the end, still playing. As the Stones wrote on Torn and Frayed: And his coat is torn and frayed, it's seen much better days / Just as long as the guitar plays, let it steal your heart away.
The music video for You Don't Know How It Feels
Petty had a knack for writing nondescript characters like few others, especially what seemed to be the hardest for a rock songwriter: a female character. From his debut with American Girl to his pre-album single Mary Jane’s Last Dance, he wrote women as people, as Paul Zollo put it, he treated the women of his songs "gently". It’s been noted by multiple reviewers how Time to Move On is written to be from the perspective of a female as opposed to Petty’s himself. Broken skyline, moving through the airport / She’s an honest defector, conscientious objector, now her own protector. The pre-chorus lists out rhetorical questions of the woman’s mind, Which way to the love land? / Which way to something better? / Which way to forgiveness? / Which way do I go? Petty described his writing process for this album as less refined, often his lines were seemingly leading into the confusion that was plaguing him and his characters, he noted the third verse as a ‘victim’ of this: Nauseous adrenalin, breaking up a dog fight / Like a deer in headlights, frozen in real time / I’m losing my mind. There’s an uneasiness about the photo Petty is painting, how he goes from a story of an empowered woman to someone that can only be described in an animalistic way to describe their anger and fear. There’s an important lyric in the bridge right before the descent into fear, Sometime later, getting the words wrong / Wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme. The story ends as unresolved and hopeless as it seemed to begin. It showcases Petty’s Dylan-esque storytelling better than anything else, the melancholic verses are cut through with one of the most positive choruses on the album: It's time to move on, time to get going / What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing / But under my feet, baby, grass is growing / It's time to move on, it's time to get going. The instrumentation is played in a hopeful way as well, never turning the song into a downer no matter how desperate the lyrics became. Whether conscious or not, Petty seemed unable to make a truly upsetting story at any point, always twisting a realistically positive knot to end what many would let become a sad song. You Wreck Me was written with the idea to invoke the classic Heartbreakers tracks of the 70s and 80s. Petty called You Wreck Me one of his
favorite tracks on the album, starting as just a guitar part by Mike Campbell, entitled You Rock Me. The band workshopped the song till Petty landed on Wreck - his idea of the lyrics was invoke his nostalgia laden writing of the past. The line Run with me, wherever I go / Just play dumb, whatever you know reminds of his lyrics on the band's first album, sounding like it would be at home on Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. Petty would speak later in his career about harboring an ill will towards his earlier, more generic writing, citing it’s lack of depth and shallow meanings. You Wreck Me is an evolved version of those ideas, while still loose and meandering, that’s the point. When discussing the song in 2021 Benmont Tench said, “It’s fun to dive into all that, and the playfulness of Honey Bee, the sheer rock and roll of Cabin Down Below, the craft in You Wreck Me, and just the goofiness of ‘I’ll be the boy in the corduroy pants’ and just all that wonderful stuff. The wistfulness, the humor, the sadness, the loss, and just everything that he’s saying, which is also pretty damn funny.” All the Heartbreakers shared those thoughts on Petty, citing his humor as one of his great traits and strongest pieces of his writing. Rick Rubin said of Petty’s writing, “There was always a lightheartedness about Tom and you could hear a really serious, emotional lyric, and then all of a sudden a snide lyric would rear its head - which is more what he was like in real life, He had a great sense of humor.”
“I still look at it like we’re writing rock and roll records and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.” -Tom Petty, 1994
It feels as though Tom Petty was so good at communicating his emotions that he skipped over the boilerplate, umbrella terms: he was never sad in writing, he was melancholic, he was never hurt, he was heartbroken, he was never angry, just disappointed. That’s where It’s Good To Be King comes into play. A sarcastically worded exploration into anger: It’s good to be king, if just for a while / To be there in velvet, yeah, to give ‘em a smile / It’s good to get high and never come down / It’s good to be king of your own little town / Yeah, the world would swing if I were king / Can I help it if I still dream time to time? The song is almost combative, removing anger in the same way You Don't Know How It Feels removed it. Asking for permission over thoughts and feelings, introducing himself as beneath others, how the only place he had any sort of notoriety or power is a made up place. It’s good to be king and have your own way / Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day / And when your bulldog barks and your canary sings / You’re out there with winners, it’s good to be king. The song also reads like a man finally on his own after years being in a certain dynamic. How after losing a friend and colleague of 15 years could feel. Petty said of the song: "It's one of my favorite songs I ever wrote. 'Excuse me if I have some place in my mind / Where I go time to time...' I loved that. And I liked all the verses. I thought it worked really well. I was very pleased with that song. That's just the truth. I thought it was one of my best things. That one had something to say." The song ends with Petty defensively apologizing, Excuse me if I have some place in my mind / Where I go time to time. The song plays out in a grand arrangement of strings with the Heartbreakers all playing some of the best work in their careers. Benmont Tench plays one of his best piano pieces of the album at the end when the song builds to an almost cinematic ending. Matthew Greenwald wrote of the song upon its release in 1994, "One of, if not the most, self-effacing and personal songs to reach the Top Ten charts in the 1990s, "It's Good to Be King" deals with the phenomenon of rock & roll stardom." Petty had never been openly critical of the issues fame had brought him, even after almost being ripped to shreds by an audience in Winterland at a 1977 show or when his house was burned down in 1987 - he accepted it as best he could as the price he paid to do what he loved. Petty was able to remain private for the majority of his career - the public were shielded from knowing about his wife and kids for years for their protection - but he still was trapped by the same pitfalls that any person has with being in the public eye. His lyrics, the ones he chose not to include with physical albums for many years, were oftentimes not diaristic yet still clearly laced with a certain amount of vulnerability to the storytelling that everything was speculated to be real - take him being asked if the subject of American Girl was a singular, real woman he knew as an example of that. It wasn’t until Wildflowers that his work started to focus on him and his relationship to fame and the music business. While promoting his Greatest Hits compilation in 1993 he told an interviewer, “I’m not obligated to bare my soul to anybody, especially in public. It’s a tough thing, but nobody wants to hear you moan about it. And I do appreciate that people are interested enough to want to interview me or to want to know anything about me at all. I am flattered. But it is very hard to sit down and just talk about yourself constantly. I just want to be a musician and play music.” It’s Good To Be King is a reasonable musical look at this same concept, while also being a reasonable exploration of a quiet resentment building into a sarcastic lyric on how one could only be left alone when dogs get wings.
The music video for It's Good To Be King
"I liked that phrase 'It's only a broken heart.' Like you can throw away the most serious aliment known to man. Like saying 'It's only cancer.' It's a pretty song. And a kind of bittersweet one." - Tom Petty, 2007
In 1983, Yes released Owner of a Lonely Heart, where the chorus contains the line Owner of a lonely heart / Much better than the owner of a broken heart. Eleven years later Petty penned I’m not afraid anymore, it’s only a broken heart. More than some other songs on the album there’s a palpable sense of a real heartbreak transpiring as the words enter the world,
What I would give to start all over again / And clean up my mistakes. The first verse illustrates what feels like a narrator trapped within in realization he’s fallen out of love: Here comes that feeling I’ve seen in your eyes / Back in the old days, before the hard times / I know the place where your secrets / Out of the sunshine, down in the valley. The song grapples with the heartbreak that happens when letting go of the person who knows more than anyone else, the fear that feels easier to permit than a heartbreak. I’m not afraid anymore, It’s only a broken heart reads like a realization that the fear of a broken heart isn’t worth the fear one lives in as they come to their choices. It’s only a broken heart, almost sarcastic, as Petty stated: the worst pain known to man but still better than living in unhappiness. Stand in the moonlight, stand under heaven / Wait for an answer, hold out forever. Benmont Tench said of Petty’s creative process on the album, “He found a way to
reveal the songs in what seems to be a much more personal manner. And it’s some kind of evolution in the songwriting. He had hit some landmark or some watershed moment or something in his songwriting where he had gone to a different emotional place or a different way of revealing emotion.” Adria Petty said that during the time the album was being written Petty was going to therapy for the first time, something that got showcased largely through the emotional maturity and revelations found on the album. She said that those years were painful for him, marked by so much change that he had no idea how to attempt to navigate. Wildflowers was written during a longer period than Petty had taken to write any album other of his, and showcased the different interations of himself and his emotions as he healed himself. Interviewed in the studio in 1994, Rick Rubin said “If you're making the kind of records that capture a moment in time, the more spread out those moments of time are, the more interesting they sound when they are put together.” Wildflowers is so closely connected to a man's subsequent breakdown and rebirth that it's individual songs work together to create a rich tapestry of the human heart as it's stitched back together, and It's Only a Broken Heart is one of the moments this idea is on it's most earnest display.
Honey Bee was described by Petty to be a break from the mounting seriousness of the album. It’s a jam-like song, rougher than what would be expected of the band. The lyrics are largely nonsense, sounding like Petty just riffing through the piece. “I wanted it to be part gibberish. Where it would be clear to anyone that I'm not taking this too seriously.” The song is largely nonsense, as Petty aimed for, with all the lyrics comprised of an amalgamation of one liners with little to no correlation to each other. I'm a man in a trance / I'm a boy in short pants when I see my honey bee. From the looks of Honey Bee and Oasis’ Digsy’s Dinner, the nonsensical rock song was having a grand comeback in 1994, though it was horribly short-lived. Proceeding to take itself too seriously for the rest of the decade, lyrics such as She give me her monkey hand and a Rambler sedan / I'm the king of Milwaukee were now unfortunately slated to become extinct. Mike Campbell talked of the more humorous side of Petty’s writing saying, “His sense of humor, I think, really came from - first of all, he was really smart, and he read a lot. And I know that he had probably had a library of stuff that he could pull from at any moment because he was well-read, and he watched a lot of old movies and probably picked up a lot of lines from that that, and he just seemed to be able to throw down a humorous limerick anytime he wanted to.” The song made its live debut when the Heartbreakers were the musical guest on a Saturday Night Live episode in late November of 1994. Steve Ferrone has prior commitments making him unable to appear with the band, so Petty called Dave Grohl of Nirvana to sit in on drums. The performance is given a typical Grohl flourishing on drums: loud and fast. Grohl said the song is a prime example of a garage rock song, making one want to absolutely go crazy on it. Petty had offered the drummer position to Grohl, who turned it down to focus on his own ventures, one that would lead to the first wildly successful Foo Fighters album and their reign as the titans of standing rock bands in the 2000s.
Playing out like a campfire song, almost as if someone suddenly picked up a guitar and let out every emotion they feared quietly to themselves, Don't Fade On Me returns to the more serious subjects at hand on the album. Petty takes a very intimate approach to this song, I remember you so clearly, the first one through the door / And I return to find you drifting too far from the shore / I remember feeling this way, you can lose it without knowing / You wake up and you don't notice which way the wind is blowing / Don’t Fade, no, don’t fade on me. In the vein of Straight into Darkness, Petty explores the idea of falling out of love in a way few, if any others, have. Sometimes there’s nothing to blame other than people change, while Straight into Darkness explores this idea as not being a negative thing as opposed to an inevitable pain, Don’t Fade On Me examines it from a complete opposite perspective. You were the one who made things different / You were the one who took me in / You were the one thing I could count on / Above all you were my friend. There’s a certain darkness felt within the song, almost seemingly like it was coming right from the the deepest, most jaded part of the heart as Petty sang. How else could a line like Was it love that took you under? Or did you know too much? / Was it something you could picture? But never could quite touch? There’s a certain detached manner to the way it was sung, there being such a
passion felt within the lyrics. His daughter, Adria, when speaking of the album, mentioned this track specifically stating: “His whole life was changing and he didn’t like change and he was incredibly private. But I did know that this record was like, ‘After this record, I’m divorcing your mother.’ Like I could tell from just the lyrics of Don't Fade On Me. But I was really proud of him that he was brave enough to do what he thought would make him happy. He was ready to clean house. I think he was gearing up for it. And I don’t think he even knew it until after he had written it.” Petty had a way of asserting his emotions through his music, but still masking his life under a guise of mystery. While anyone could listen to this song a connect it’s written by someone going through the ringer, it doesn’t reveal the details of his heartbreak in a way that the pieces could be easily, if even, put together. Adria also said of her father and Wildflowers, “There are things that are so indicative of him being in a time of change. He had sort of this complete escape in the music at that point. There’s not any other album I can point to in particular that so strongly reflected what his psychological state of mind was at the time that he was making it. So in that way, I think it’s very personal.” Hard On Me continues the calm before the storm. Petty states that it’s one of his favorites from the album, as well as a favorite of Rick Rubin. One of the first tracks written for the album, it’s vulnerability sets the stage for everything found after. The song plays out as a man at his ropes end, where he finally lets go as he realizes no one has been holding the other end. Take all I got to hold on till tomorrow / And you want to make it hard, you want to make it hard on me. It's a desperate song, almost too sincere to listen to, the pain prickingly beneath the surface creating an environment of heartbreak shrouded in honest pleas for love. Maybe if I try, I could turn the other cheek / Maybe, but how big do I have to be? The line is delivered in front of a performance by the Heartbreakers that highlights the confusing desperation the narrator is feeling, no instrument takes center stage as they all fall into a somber, up-tempo precision as the reserved anger turns into a revelation of hidden desires, I need someone to put their arm around me / Shelter me from all harm / Just as I find something to believe in / You wanna make it hard. Emotional men are absent from much of music, even the most diaristic and prolific male songwriters shield themselves off from being this open about their sensitivities. Bob Dylan rarely ventured this openly, neither did Leonard Cohen, or James Taylor, or anyone else whose emotions were laid on their sleeve. The only close reveal like this came from a deep cut on The Rolling Stones 1980 album, Emotional Rescue. In the album's closer All About You, it was Keith Richards who penned I’m so sick and tired of hanging around with dogs like you / Who’ll tell me lies and let me think they’re true / What am I to do?, until hitting the ending line I may miss you, but missing me just isn’t you. There’s this sense of desperation in the lyrics, less so than Petty’s here, but the building blocks of what would become. The admission of pain, wanting to be loved as unconditionally, be sheltered from a weathering storm by someone who seems to not care about much. It’s a vulnerability men are told to hide, that there is shame in wanting to be the one loved after being scorched by the fire.
In a similar break from the rain like Honey Bee, Cabin Down Below allows a breath after two highly emotional songs. Petty said of the song, "It's blues and rockabilly mixed. And It was another one that I saw as a relief in the sequence of things that it would be a
moment of semi-nonsense for a minute. 'Okay, we're gonna party for a minute here.' The song continues the motif of the radio in the album, I got a radio / Put it on soft and low, which elicits the thought of Bernie Taupin composition from a decade earlier, Sad Songs (Say So Much). There’s a myth to music and art that when an artist is suffering that they create the best of their work, how Picasso was best at his blue period and that Rumours is a classic because of the drama around it’s creation. What the suffering artist creates may be a great piece, yes, but oftentimes this title comes from the fact their work is being used as an outlet for others' pain. It’s not like something such as Layla by Derek and the Dominos wasn’t a phenomenal stand alone song - it is - but it was created from a place of desperation, heartbreak, and pleading. To some, Eric Clapton had to suffer to make his greatest single, as his suffering gave the soundtrack to the world's own struggle with similar situations. Taupin wrote It's times like these when we all need to hear the radio / 'Cause from the lips of some old singer, we can share the troubles we already know. The suffering of the artist is often attributed to them being at a highly productive part of their life, that them putting all that emotion into their art suddenly connects them into this mystical, untapped potential that was never realized before. In reality, it’s just easier to accept your own pain if someone validates those feelings by singing of their own. Something like Blood on the Tracks by Dylan is underlined by the heartbreak he was living through as he created it, its songs connect to those who are broken hearted in the same ways, and is thus seen as the crème de la crème of what he could do as an artist. Even if he had Blowing in the Wind a decade before and License to Kill was yet to be a flash in the pan, this would be what he was remembered for by some - for being the old singer tuned into for someone else to describe their own emotions. Petty sang on You Don’t Know How It Feels, Turn the radio loud, I’m too alone to be proud now singing I got a radio, turn it on soft and low after two of the most emotional taxing lyrics he’d ever penned. Why don't you tune in and turn them on? / They reach into your room, just feel their gentle touch / When all hope is gone, Sad songs say so much. Wildflowers, in many ways, stands as this piece for so many people: Tom Petty is the old singer whose lips share the truths hidden with the lost people in the world.
I never pray, but tonight I’m on my knees I need to hear some sounds That recognize the pain in me. - Richard Ashcroft, Bittersweet Symphony, 1997
Then there’s To Find A Friend. Petty described the song as his realization of what had been in the back of his mind for most of the album: the dissolution of his marriage. In the middle of his life, man left his wife / Ran off to be bad, boy it was sad / Found a new bar / And went under another name, created a whole new game / And the days went by like paper in the
wind / Everything changed, then it changed again / It’s hard to find a friend. Petty said of the album he tried to limit the editing he did to his words, opting to speak as his words came to him and To Find A Friend exemplifies this method. In the past, Petty had never been shy about his emotions, though, as stated, they were shielded in a way that was impossible to decipher his story: what was fictional? What was real? Did this happen to him?
When did this happen to him? But To Find A Friend, in its first line, speaks directly to the
audience in an unflinching way. Petty said of the song in 1994, “To Find A Friend is just a beautiful little song, but I think subconsciously it probably had something to do with my life, you know, because I was- I was becoming disenchanted with my marriage at the time.” His daughter spoke to this as well, saying that his metaphor of paper in the wind was one of the defining lines that made her realize what was going on between her parents. The song continues, Meanwhile then, his wife's boyfriend moved in and took over the house / Everybody was quiet as a mouse / And it changed their lives, changed their plans / Slowly they grew apart, boy, it woulda broke your heart. In the way that it feels like Don’t Fade on Me is the second perspective of Straight into Darkness, To Find A Friend shows both perspectives of this separation. The man gets to run off and figure
out his mid-life crisis, while his family lives in shambles as the wife’s boyfriend reveals his true colors. Petty discussed the saying the second verse is meant to be scary, how the family gets turned over to a new figure that turns out to be horrible, rendering the family silent as they navigate their new world. Petty wrote no resolution to either storyline, ending the song repeating the chorus, The days went by like paper in the wind / Everything changed, then it changed again. The songs main acoustic guitar riff is similar to what’s heard on the title track, the biggest difference between the two would be the drums, with To Find a Friends’ core beat is more pushed forward, creating an almost disorienting feeling, like a heartbeat as the story gets told. The drummer on the track is none other than Ringo Starr, who showcases his expertise as a drummer, not only with impeccable sense of timing but his ability to fill the space in a song with what it needs as opposed to what would make him stand out the most. Nothing about Starr’s work on the track is flashy enough to insinuate he’s Ringo Starr guesting on a song, he's just doing a pretty damn great drum track. Petty always seemed fond of the track despite its subject matter, telling Paul Zollo in 2007: "It was those days. I was getting stuff. Like I said, I think I was really at the top of my game. Things were coming to me with very little effort. The material was just coming out." In a 1994 interview he had said something similar with, “This time in particular, this day in particular, this part of my life in particular, I feel more comfortable being myself. It’s soul music, I think that’s what I am - I think I’m a soul singer. Because that’s what you have to do - you have to connect to your soul in a way. That’s what’s going on with me artistically right now. I feel very prolific right now. I feel more like me.”
A Higher Place is part of the last string of songs on the album that feel as though they are all telling parts of the same story. Focusing more on a similar narrative structure, the song follows a man on the run from some unnamed evil, Well, I fool myself and I don't know why /
I thought we could ride this out / I was up all night making up my mind, but now I've got my doubts / I got my eye on the waterline / Trying to keep my sense of humor. It’s how you could view the inner monologue of the man who ran in To Find A Friend or could be the man we see at the bar towards at the end of Crawling Back to You. A Higher Place could be read as a metaphor for drinking - Before that river takes us down / We gotta find somewhere that's dry - making these songs feel even more connected. How the marriage of To Find A Friend dissolves and the man runs off to find a new bar, while his family is left picking up the pieces. How that flows into the seclusion and regret fueling House in the Woods. Petty said during the 90s about the album that while he knew his marriage was falling apart, he didn’t aim to create a concept album of what he was going through at that moment, “I wasn’t really thinking along a thematic line, but when I hear it, I can see that it was working in the back of my mind somewhere.” It’s also worth noting that the song's connections, making a cohesive story in the final stretch, could be a result of Petty’s sequencing while whittle the album down from 25 tracks finished tracks created during the sessions. Mike Campbell said Petty always had the final say on how the record would be released, and Petty himself stated it took him 3 months to create the version of the album heard today. House in the Woods is the sister song of Cabin Down Below, the more rock-focused piece where Petty gets to let the band go where they are most at home. House in the Woods finds the narrator in the titular setting, though it’s not exactly clear why he’s there. I'm going down to the house in the woods/ See my little darling, I'm going down, out in the fields with summertime coming. The chorus sheds a little light on the story that’s becoming darker by the line, Oh, my love, what can I do? / What can I do but love you? / For the rest of my days, the rest of my nights / What can I do but love you, babe? The next verse the narrator confirms his isolation, Summertime falls on the house in the woods / Back by the power lines / I ain't got a neighbor for nine or ten miles back in the tall pines before a variation of the chorus is sung, What could I do but trust you? - The story never becomes quite clear. Is the narrator running to or from his love? Is the seclusion a happy accident or done on purpose? Is he the same man who was running from home or is he who appears next, trudging back after his time alone?
Crawling Back to You is the last stop before the end of the album and, almost fittingly, tells the story of a duo nearing the end of their own journey. Waiting by the side of the road for a day to break so we could go / Down into Los Angeles, with dirty hands and worn out knees / The ranger came with burning eyes / The chambermaid awoke surprised, thought she'd seen the last of him / She shook her head and let him in. There’s a certain narrative structure that appears on this song, telling a sensationalized story of a man escaping from an undisclosed place, shocking much of everyone as he makes his way towards his realization. Hey baby, there's something in your eyes, trying to say to me / That I'm gonna be alright if I believe in you, it's all I wanna do. Following the rest of Petty’s ideas of the mixed bag of emotions that follow you through turmoil, the line feels as if it’s the last ditch effort to mend what has long been proven to be a far too broken a heart. The next verse finds the narrator at a bar, It was me and my sidekick, he was drunk and I was sick / We were caught up in a barroom fight till an Indian shot out the lights, then turns an inner monologue, I’m so tired of being tired / Sure as night will follow day, most things I worry about never happen anyways. The song concludes with the repetition of I keep crawling back to you. The imagery of the last verse is vivid enough that it paints the photo without negating room for interpretation. Petty said of it, "If you get too specific, you kind of want to pull away from it. Because now things are getting almost narrative, and you don't want to do that. So you give them a little taste of that. and then back away. Into something that is not as nailed down." That last line had migrated from song to song as the demo tracks was being recorded, desperate to find a home that made sense when it landed in Crawling Back To You. Petty spoke of the line saying his cousin sent him a book of phrases, and the first one he flipped to was that one, and he wanted to use it. The song is one of those pieces that makes Petty seem as but a vessel for the stories that come through him, how even though there’s so much workingshopping done of the song it feels so perfect in its final iteration and messaging it’s almost hard to believe he had to work toward it. The Heartbreakers all spoke very highly of the song, Steve Ferrone spoke of the ending line in 2021 saying, “That line stuck out like a sore thumb to me for some reason, and I found myself in a lot of fear about a lot of different things and that line really just popped out at me. And when Tom passed, I decided to have it tattooed on my arm.”Benmont Tench said of recording the song “If you have a song like Crawling Back To You, the music has a mood. [..] and so, you dial in. I remember my hands on the piano and recording the sounds there, in the beginning of it. I don’t really have a recollection of playing the actual take, and that’s a good sign. If you black out, stone cold sober, during a take, then you’re inside the music. To me, that’s one of the best things there. That’s one of my favorite things that we ever did.” Tom Petty was quoted in the 2021 documentary on the creation of Wildflowers, Somewhere You Feel Free, saying of the last line in Crawling Back To You: “I was really pleased with that because that’s me creeping into the song there. That’s me. Worry so much and then, when I start to think, almost everything, if you make a list, that you were worried about never happens.”
In one of the cut tracks, Something Could Happen, Petty penned the line Sometimes the woods must get lost in the trees. On Wake Up Time, he penned: You may find a forest there in the trees. In the same way the rest of the album catalogs a human confusion in the face of grief, it finds itself in between lines of songs that would never find themselves together until almost 25 years after they were written. Petty described Wake Up Time as a song he knew would be a closer, that he wanted the album to lead to this point. It’s a song that can only be described as bittersweet, with it’s messaging coming across to be of things going unexpectedly. You can hold on forever and still miss the dance is a particularly poignant messaging with this thought. There’s a certain thread that Petty holds to many times on this album, this idea that life passes you by and unless you do something about it you’re stuck in your own confusing, narrow-minded maze. How one could feel they had everything and realize it’s nothing when looked back upon. Wildflowers is a depressing album despite the
slight sheen placed over it, it’s an exploration of how to grieve a life you have yet to leave or lose. How to change your life is to break your own heart and others, how no journey of healing is paved on a path that makes it easy. It’s confusing, every moment something feels okay is undercut with the ideas of fear and regret. Wake Up Time brings you back to high school, when everything was changing, but there was a false hope this would be the last time life feel as disorienting and free, disarming a world view as gently as one can. Yeah, you were so cool back in high school, what happened? / You were so sure not to have your spirits dampened / But you're just a poor boy alone in this world / You're just a poor boy alone in this world. The song starts with Petty softly explaining what leads one down the path, You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams / You follow the leader into the trees / And what's in there waiting, neither one of us knows / You gotta keep one eye open the further you go, before shattering the memory into the present, You never dreamed you’d go down on one knee, but now / Who could have seen, you’d be so hard to please somehow? / You’re just a poor boy, a long way from home, before the chorus, uncharacteristically spoken word adds a little hope again: It’s wake up time / Time to open up your eyes, and rise and shine. There’s something poignant about Petty’s positivity, how despite the fact he’d just cataloged the breakdown of a man who once thought he had everything to turn around and find nothing, he’s attempting to give a map out that he himself had written on the way. This song was written early on during the sessions, while still in the throws of everything that seems to feel absent here. Petty told Paul Zollo of the song in 2007, "I always did think it would be the end. I wasn't sure what would be the beginning, but I knew that was going to be the end, and that I was gonna work towards that. And that would be the finale. of the double album. So that was kind of a good thing to saving your back pocket, knowing where you were going." About twenty years earlier, he told Cameron Crowe during an interview that there was nothing wrong with being positive. This sheds a lot of light on Petty as a writer, and a person, the aim to find a silver lining when it’s the furthest thing from the forefront of the mind. How, during a two year stretch of changing every stable part of his life and writing down where his mind when as he did that, he had already figured out a way he wanted to end this exploration into love and loss. The song ends with the protagonist, Petty himself, leaving the woods he’s been trapped in, with what feels like an impossibly positive outlook on what he witnessed: Well, if he gets lucky, a boy finds a girl / To help him shoulder all the pain in this world / And if you follow your feelings, you follow your dreams / You might find a forest there in the trees / You’ll be alright, it’s just gonna take time / But now, who could’ve see you’d be so hard to please somehow. An autobiographical tinge of sadness permeates the line, almost as if reassuring the listener as he does so for himself.
“I’m very pleased with that one. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever done. And I always liked the line where you’re going to be - what is it? - ‘It’s going to be alright, it’s just going to take time.’ And that was the idea behind it, was just to say everybody’s been knocked around a little bit but you’ve got to keep some kind of faith in yourself, and that you’ll probably be alright.” - Tom Petty, 1994
Tom Petty during a promotional shoot for Wildflowers in 1994 by Robert Sebree
There’s not a doubt endings are hard. The curtain lowering on something that left such an impact that its vacancy shines much longer than a story existed. Endings are hard, but they don’t have to be full of sadness. Tom Petty, in oh so many ways, made this clear, how heartbreak could only exist because one was once loved. The world is constantly changing, as are people and it was accepting the beauty in uncertainty that gave us Wildflowers. That seeing the end as not a loss but as a new beginning, that change didn’t mean for the worst. “You’ve changed” being met with an “I hope.” To Tom Petty, change represented growth, shedding the skin of who you were to become who you are. Of his choice of closing track he said, “I thought it was very important that we end it on a hopeful note. You know, some of this subject matter on this album is downright dark, and I’m sure that I’ve been through those downright dark periods, but it’s always just believing that there is something redeeming about human beings. That’s what carries me through the toughest times.” Like no other album in his forty year career, Wildflowers is indefinitely tied to Tom Petty the artist as it is to Tom Petty the human. Rick Rubin told of how Petty confided in him that Wildflowers scared him because he didn’t know why it was so good, that it’s shadow loomed over everything that came before and after as a mammoth of perfection created out of a labor of love. Even almost a decade after his death, it’s looked upon as an encapsulation of all there was to him: the outlandish humor, the smile toward the future, the beloved nature of it’s pieces, the positivity that seemed almost impossible to separate from a man who doesn’t seem to have a single detractor. Paul Zollo wrote of him after his death, that there was no version of him that couldn’t be found within the lines of his songs. While his career started from a childhood dream of being a rockstar, being like the Elvis Presely he met or The Beatles he saw on the Ed Sullivan show, it closed being almost an open letter to accepting life as it comes to you, how you can’t change the past but you can look towards the future with the knowledge you gained. Tom Petty was Wildflowers. Petty had said of the track, “When the orchestra comes in halfway through, you know everything's gonna be okay.", and in a way, it could be applied to pretty much anything he ever wrote. You hear Tom Petty and you know it’s going to be okay. He wrote in 1991 I won’t say goodbye, my friend / For you and I will meet again when we're lt expecting it, a line that becomes ever more poignant as the years pass. The way Petty took the idea of an ending and molded it into a celebration of the change is how it feels we look upon himself now. How it's easy to find him in something as common as a wildflower in an endless forest.
Wildflowers exemplifes the idea of unplanned beauty where there once was an abandoned space. Looking toward uncertainy with hope and toward the world with eyes looking for the beauty of lifes constant changes, the album is an experience that can't be found anywhere else. In just an hour you are taken on the journey of a man healing himself as he heals whoever chooses to listen. It showcases the vulnerability of an artist, the idea that words can heal even the most hopeless of causes, that you can find a field of wildflowers where once all that was seen were weeds.
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