Wildflowers

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Roots Rock

• warm
• earnest
• heartland

About

For an artist who built his career on a certain degree of stubbornness, <i>Wildflowers</i> wasn’t just an admission of vulnerability; it was like standing naked in front of an audience. By the mid-1990s, after two decades of marriage, Petty was heading toward divorce—a personal cataclysm that would fuel much of 1999’s <i>Echo</i>. But you could hear the heartbreak coming on 1994’s <i>Wildflowers</i>, his second solo album, and one that features some of his most somber tunes: The title track finds him pining for a kind of beauty you can’t possess without ruining it, while the heartache in “To Find a Friend” is self-evident. “It’s good to be king/And have your own way,” Petty sings on “It’s Good to Be King.” Sure—but the subtext here is that it’s a kingdom of one. The magic, of course, is that despite the effort and attention that was put into the creation of <i>Wildflowers</i>, the album sounds natural and unforced—a sense of intuitiveness attributed, in part, to the influence of new producer Rick Rubin. Petty was writing from a quieter place now, and finding nuance in his solitude. And he was in a productive state of mind: Rubin said Petty once paused the tape between a demo playback and wrote an entirely new song, end to end, in a few minutes. The Rubin sessions would ultimately yield dozens of songs, and while Petty originally planned to make <i>Wildflowers</i> a double album, Warner Bros. didn’t think it warranted the length (a massive 2020 compilation, <i>Wildflowers & All the Rest</i>, would finally set those tracks free). But even in its original 15-track form, <i>Wildflowers</i> remains one of Petty’s greatest achievements—a surprisingly personal, deeply tuneful collection that finds Petty at his most vulnerable.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits