The classic song Tom Petty wrote in “three and half minutes”
The best songs ever written tend to feel like gifts from the heavens. You may have just been strumming your guitar for a few minutes trying to think of ideas, but all of a sudden, a song takes over, and you’re off on a tangent that seems to be flowing through you that results in a classic. Tom Petty may have been strumming in the right place at the right time more than a few times in life, but he admitted that ‘Wildflowers’ took less time to create than most people to make a sandwich.
Then again, look at where Petty was at this point in his life. He had just come off of some of the most celebrated music of his career with Full Moon Fever and had received unofficial songwriting lessons from the likes of George Harrison and Bob Dylan when working in The Traveling Wilburys. That would make anyone a better writer, but Petty usually had his bag of tricks as well.
Outside of working with fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne on the past few albums, Petty wanted something much more raw when working on his next album. For as good as those albums are, the layered production made the band sound more like an assembling line than a group of musicians half the time, and Wildflowers was a way for them to get back in touch with their roots.
The germs of the title track began as Petty was fiddling around with music in his studio when putting equipment together. When talking with Paul Zollo, he said the song came out in less than five minutes, saying, “Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it. I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song, and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song”.
If it comes that easy, though, any artist would start to question. Nothing that perfect falls out of the sky on a whim, but when he goes back to it, Petty figures that it is good for him to keep. Although the crux of a great song was already there, it wouldn’t get the magic until it was brought into the studio with Rick Rubin.
When listening to a rough mix, this song doesn’t seem to have anything to it — just the kind of strum-along track that someone plays by the campfire. Once you start zeroing in on everything, though, there’s practically a rock and roll orchestra going on underneath everything, from different classical instruments buried in the final mix to a beautiful performance by Benmont Tench on keyboards.
Since Petty admits that he was just throwing words together, he admitted that the lyrics weren’t that specific, recalling in Somewhere You Feel Free, “‘Wildflowers’ is probably just for people you love or people you wish good to, just to wish them well. It’s one of the only times that I played a song from the top to the end, all the lyrics and all the music, in one go”.
There might not be much to it, but when one’s inspiration is flying like that, they get in tune with the masterpieces. It’s never easy to grasp, but when it’s the right idea, it goes from talking about something vague to the universal truths everyone can appreciate.
