“The production intimidates me”: The album Tom Petty was always in competition with
Any artist who has been in the game long enough is as much in competition with themselves as with the other major artists on the scene. For as long as someone keeps racking up classic records, there will always be a mantle of pressure that comes with following it up, especially when the last one had major singles riding on it. Tom Petty never really cared much for competition when it came to other artists, but he thought that he waited years before finally getting the kind of masterpiece that no one could touch.
Looking through nearly all of Petty’s albums, though, he has never had a track record for having terrible releases. While some are a bit sleepier than others, none of his albums are bad by any stretch, whether that’s the moodiness of Hard Promises, the grand scope of Southern Accents, or even his turn as a solo star with Jeff Lynne on Full Moon Fever.
The last one of those records may have given Petty some of the biggest hits of his career, but it arguably did a bit of harm in the process, too. The rest of the Heartbreakers weren’t as involved, and when they got to working with Lynne on the album Into the Great Wide Open, they started to feel like sidemen within their own band instead of the gang they were supposed to be.
But it’s not like Petty was going to roll over and play what they wanted him to play. He knew that his muse had never let him down before, and when he began work on Wildflowers, he found that perfect middle ground between the rock band format and the moodier solo material that he had started with Lynne.
The record would cost the band their drummer, Stan Lynch, but the rest of the songs are still miles above anything they made in their heyday. Compared to the pop-centric tunes on the last record, there’s something for every stripe of rock fan on Petty’s 1994 masterpiece, including ballads like the title track and ‘Crawling Back To You’, rockers like ‘You Wreck Me’ and ‘Honey Bee’, and music so moody that it’s hard to fit into one box like ‘Don’t Fade on Me’ and ‘Wake Up Time’.
Although Petty would spend the rest of his career bending his sound into different shapes, he still felt that few could touch what he created on Wildflowers, saying, “I like the music on that album. It’s got a purity to it that clears your mind when you hear it. The production of that record intimidates me. It’s so well done that I find myself in competition with it all the time. Trying to do something on that level.”
It’s not like Petty is exactly wrong, either. As much of a genius as Lynne was when making his masterpieces for the heartland rocker, Rick Rubin found the perfect middle ground between the earthiness of the band and the orchestrated pieces of their sound, like deciding to add the moody string section from Michael Kamen on ‘It’s Good To Be King’ or having Petty play piano on ‘Wake Up Time’.
Above all else, there’s a certain human quality on Wildflowers that doesn’t seem to come from any other record in his catalogue. Many of Petty’s albums can get a touch predictable after a while, but in the era that was mostly dominated by grunge, the fact that ‘You Wreck Me’ was never treated like dad rock is a feat unto itself.
