The 1994 song Tom Petty said was so good it confused him: “A state of consciousness”
Tom Petty didn’t feel the need to question the way that his muse worked whenever he wrote songs.
He liked the idea of capturing a feeling in every one of his tunes, and while he never claimed to understand where a lot of his inspiration came from, he also knew that thinking about it too much would mean that it would somehow be gone in an instant. He didn’t want to be the kind of songwriter who laboured over getting a massive pop hit, and if he was going to make something timeless, it was going to need to come from the heart before anything else.
But a lot of Petty’s best records have been defined by the emotions going on in the background. It was a massive victory that brought him to make Damn the Torpedoes, but even if his happiest albums also happen to be his most successful like Full Moon Fever, you get a better sense of who he was as a person by looking at the more morose pieces of his discography throughout his career.
Hard Promises was already coming off of one of the biggest records of his career, and while it still sounds great, you can tell that he’s incredibly lost trying to figure out where to go next. And despite his divorce taking a massive toll on his mental health in the 1990s, Wildflowers was an album that almost shook him to his core when the songs kept coming as quickly as they did. His home life was on the rocks, but he could only pour out his emotion into song.
After all, songs are one of the few places where any songwriter can manage to be honest, and Petty felt the need to document a lot of what he was talking about. Echo was the aftermath of his divorce, but this was the calm before the storm in lots of ways on tunes like ‘Don’t Fade On Me’ and ‘To Find a Friend’. So to get a song as beautiful as ‘Wildflowers’ in the thick of everything was a strange miracle.
In fact, even Petty was confused about how the song was when he laid it down, saying, “It’s one of the few times this has ever happened in my life. I had a little studio at home and I put the mic on, [and] played the whole song straight, from the top to the end, with all the lyrics and all the music, in one go. I kept playing it back saying, ‘Well, what do we work on?’ And I figured I’m going to leave it exactly like a stream of consciousness.”
But the magic of the song ‘Wildflowers’ is about a lot more than a guy with a guitar in a room playing the song. It sounds like that from a listener’s perspective, but the fact that they managed to throw in as many bells and whistles and make the whole thing sound pretty sparse is one of the great strengths of Petty’s work. There’s an entire orchestral section in the tune, and yet the whole thing sounds like it could have been recorded over a weekend.
In fact, this song may have been Petty’s own version of what George Harrison had on the song ‘Something’. The former Beatle wasn’t looking to make the best song of all time, but the fact that he was able to make such a beautiful tune out of the air would have had anyone else questioning themselves to see if the song was too familiar or if they had lifted the melody from somewhere else by accident.
It’s never easy to make a judgment when you have a song this strong in your hands, but Petty knew better than to question it. Wildflowers did scare him with how great it was, but when you’re visited by the musical angels this often, it’s best to roll with the punches and try to be the best vessel that you can to translate that kind of music.
