With the release of his second solo studio album, Wildflowers, in 1994, Tom Petty showed a more gentle, folk-inspired side of himself. Even years later, the album remained one of his most cherished works. In 2020, Rolling Stone called it one of Petty’s greatest records, and according to his longtime keyboardist Benmont Tench, Petty himself felt the same way.
“He would always say, ‘That’s the best record we ever recorded,’” Tench recalled. “It was a moment when song after song was arriving, which doesn’t always happen 20 years after your first release.”
A Project That Came Naturally
For Petty, Wildflowers was always meant to be bigger. While the artist was also working on Hypnotic Eye in 2012, he told Rolling Stone that he had always envisioned Wildflowers as a double album.
“We recorded quite a lot of songs and dug them out… songs are just so amazing,” he said at the time.
His dream of releasing the full version of the album finally came true in 2020, when Wildflowers & All the Rest was released, featuring tracks that had been left off the original album.
Was ‘Wildflowers’ a Song for Himself?
Petty never really knew where the lyrics for “Wildflowers” came from or who they were about—until someone else pointed it out. In the 2007 documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, Petty recalled a conversation with his therapist, who had an interesting take on the song’s meaning (via The New York Times).
“That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear,” his therapist told him.
This realization hit Petty hard. As he later told biographer Warren Zanes,
“It kind of knocked me back … but I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.” (Rolling Stone).
Listen to Tom Petty’s “Wildflower” below: