“I don’t look at it as one of our normal albums”: the one record Tom Petty never bothered to promote
You can understand why labels hide behind the bureaucracy of music to make money off of musicians. Marketing strategies, processing finances, and booking tours can be easily billed as heavy lifting and unnecessary headaches for artists whose time should be otherwise spent productively in the studio. And when you’re someone like Tom Petty, who apparently walks around with hits in his back pocket, then why would you worry? The soaring royalties make substantial cuts from labels an easy pill to swallow.
While the 1970s were a competitive landscape for any heartfelt songwriter with a guitar, somehow, Petty prevailed through obscurity and became one of the era’s most prolific and profound artists. His wholehearted approach to rock songwriting thrust Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to global success and won him a place in history’s finest supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys.
Simply put, he knew his way around the recording studio. But like most stories of greatness, it ran parallel to a deep sense of personal darkness that culminated in the 1990s. Along with a difficult battle against heroin addiction, Petty’s marriage to Jane Benyo broke down in 1996, making for a chapter in his life that put his creativity on the back burner.
Nevertheless, like all tortured poets, he turned his heartache into art with his album Wildflowers. In fact, the sessions for the record were so prolific that he had enough leftover material that would later be used for the 1996 film She’s the One. In tortuous irony, the film that comedically celebrates the breaking off of marriages used Petty’s off-cuts for the soundtrack in a slick commercial move that would essentially monetise his odds and ends.
From the outset, Petty recognised the crassness in the exchange and submitted to the fact that the work he considers mediocre in comparison to Wildflowers can be happily consigned to the shallow waters of Hollywood romcoms. However, the record only sold 490,000 copies and served no real commercial purpose for Petty besides the deal struck with the studio.
Besides fans of the film who heard Petty’s voice through the speakers, the record was largely an unknown entity and neglected by any real promotional treatment. In a 1999 interview, Petty said, “It was marketed as a soundtrack and put in (those kinds of) bins. And I didn’t promote it. I think it’s a good record, but I don’t look at it as one of our normal albums.”
It was a relatively indifferent response to the body of work, which, considering it was 1999, points towards a decision on Petty’s behalf to provide an inoffensive and borderline glib take so as not to offend anyone involved in the wider project. That and the fact that a decade spent battling a heroin addiction meant the meagre success of a cobbled-together film soundtrack wasn’t high on his list of priorities. But when the haze of that trauma settled, Petty looked back on the record with little fondness.
He concluded, “I started to do it, I realised, ‘This is a bad thing.’ Because I know these people don’t want to give anything good. Who wants to give their best stuff away, right? And those albums just really suck, every fucking one of them. So I just took a bunch of stuff that I had leftover from Wildflowers, and I hastily did a couple more tracks.”
