The album that made Tom Petty depressed: “I was doing something that went against my grain”
While Tom Petty is most known for his work with his band The Heartbreakers, a number of his most commercially successful works actually came from his solo records. His first Heartbreaker-less sojourn came in the form of 1989’s Full Moon Fever and, considering that record contained hits like ‘Free Fallin’’, ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Runnin’ Down A Dream’, it worked out fairly well all things considered. Despite that, his creative peak would come a few years later, though the road to that album was anything but smooth.
After a brief reunion with The Heartbreakers in 1991 with Into The Great Wide Open, the world was Petty’s for the taking. He’d proven he could have mega-hits solo and with his backing band, but there comes the rub of having mega-hits. Sure, the sold-out tours, gold disks, and co-signs from rock legends like George Harrison and Bob Dylan are all good, but that’s not enough for the suits. You’ve got to repeat it as soon as possible and as similarly as possible. That wasn’t Petty’s plan, though.
He planned to go into the studio with famed producer Rick Rubin and cut another solo album, somewhat callously telling Paul Zollo for his book Conversations with Tom Petty: “Rick and I both wanted more freedom than to be strapped into five guys.” The news had Petty’s label doing cartwheels at first, then the other shoe dropped. Petty and Rubin, along with several guests like Mike Campbell, Carl Wilson, and the actual Ringo Starr, recorded 25 tracks for the project titled Wildflowers and planned on releasing every single one of them.
The realisation that this record was going to be a double album, the two most horrifying words a record label can hear along with “Axl Rose”, had those cartwheels end suddenly and dramatically. Thus, the negotiations began. After a long back and forth, the album was cut back to 15 tracks. Warner Bros Records head Lenny Waronker finally got through to Petty by explaining that at 15 tracks, the record was still longer than two vinyl records and thus was already a double album.
This led to ten tracks that Petty and Rubin believed in well and truly, with nowhere to put them. Thankfully, salvation came from an unlikely source. Namely, the director Ed Burns. He got in touch with Petty with the intention of having the ‘Free Fallin’’ hitmaker create the soundtrack to his second film, the romantic comedy She’s The One. Petty saw a chance to put the new songs to good use and gave him four of his favourite cut-offs from Wildflowers. That’s when an already complicated situation got even more complicated.
Shortly after Petty agreed to put those songs on the soundtrack, the actual soundtrack album to She’s The One started being marketed as an entirely new Tom Petty album. Petty spoke to his biographer Warren Zaines about how distressed this made him, saying, “I was doing something that went against my grain. Some people thought I was following up Wildflowers. Then, with everything being done at such an incredible rate of speed so that the record could come out with the film — with me making my deadline — they held the film back six months. My record came out with no movie. I was so depressed — that just made me more depressed.”
Despite the myriad of complications, everything worked out for the best. The record is widely considered one of the high points of Petty’s storied career, despite how much was left on the cutting room floor. That version of the record finally saw the light of day in 2020, though, when the full-length double album Wildflowers & All The Rest was released.
