The album Tom Petty didn’t pay enough attention to: “I’m surprised at how cohesive it is”
Not every artist is going to be in love with everything they put out. Oftentimes, the best albums tend to fall through the cracks and result in a bit of a mess, but even for the track record Tom Petty set for himself, he felt that there were a handful of releases that weren’t destined to be classics.
But Petty already had one of the most impressive creative rolls that anyone had been on by the time he reached the 1990s. For someone who had been in the public eye for over a decade, Petty still seemed to be at the top of his game, and after taking some lessons from his fellow Traveling Wilburys half the time he played, albums like Full Moon Fever were a perfect glimpse of what someone could sound like if they applied every lesson that they had ever learned as a songwriter.
Having Jeff Lynne behind the board for his solo debut and Into the Great Wide Open may have been helpful, but bringing in Rick Rubin for Wildflowers was where everything changed. Each of his previous records had sounded like they had been built from the ground up in the studio, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Rubin’s first project with Petty made the Heartbreakers sound like a band again.
While it’s technically still Petty’s second solo record, all of the Heartbreakers appear on it in some capacity minus drummer Stan Lynch. And compared to everyone feeling jaded that they weren’t a part of his solo record, there was almost too much good stuff for anything to be left on the cutting room floor, to the point where Petty was seriously considering making the whole thing a double record.
With all those leftover tracks, though, Petty did get an opportunity to give fans something extra when he made the soundtrack to the movie She’s the One. The movie was a nice detour for Petty and had some stellar tracks on it like ‘Angel Dream’ and ‘Walls’, but even when listening back to the record, Petty admitted that this was his least favourite medium to work in when sequencing a record.
Although the record turned out to be a decent record, Petty felt that he was trying to whip something together as fast as possible, saying, “What soundtracks have become is usually a sampler of popular artists of the day, or up-and-coming artists, who don’t give their best stuff. I never take part in them because I don’t want my music put up against incongruous things. I’m surprised at how cohesive it is. Sometimes you do better work when you’re in a hurry and not analyzing everything, which I wasn’t. I was just trying to get it done and hoping it had some quality to it.”
But even if this was slapped together for the film, Petty throws on some songs that had no business being left off of Wildflowers. ‘California’ and ‘Zero From Outer Space’ would have fit nicely next to tracks like ‘You Wreck Me’, and the biggest crime of this record is finding out that one of Petty’s masterpieces could have had ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ on it, featuring Ringo Star on drums and Carl Wilson’s beautiful harmonies in the background.
Even if Petty didn’t really put all of his artistic self into this record, it does stand as a nice companion piece to Wildflowers. The previous record is the obvious go-to for anyone looking for this era of Petty’s music, but anyone that likes his magnum opus and doesn’t take the time to revisit songs like ‘Walls’ is doing themselves a disservice.
