The album Tom Petty called a major leap: “It brought us up a few notches”
Tom Petty didn’t necessarily seem to care about the sonics of his records back in the day. As long as it sounded like a hit when he was strumming on guitar, it was usually worthy enough to be included on an album, no matter how bad the fidelity was on the final version. When looking back on his career, though, the heartland rocker thought that the entire band grew up by a lot the minute they hit on Wildflowers.
This is strange, considering the 1994 record is technically considered a Petty solo album. He had made the lion’s share of his previous solo outing, Full Moon Fever, with ELO frontman Jeff Lynne and Mike Campbell, but with Rick Rubin on production duties, Petty knew that he needed to have the entire band behind him.
Bringing back every one of the Heartbreakers with the exception of drummer Stan Lynch, Wildflowers is by far the most eclectic album he ever made. While the traditional rustic sounds haven’t gone anywhere, this record alone makes a damn good argument for why Petty should have been given equal billing alongside his fellow Traveling Wilburys, complete with beautiful orchestration by Michael Kamen on songs like ‘It’s Good To Be King’.
Even when it veers into different directions, the whole thing holds together as a lush tapestry of sound. The raw fury of ‘Cabin Down Below’ doesn’t sound anywhere near the same kind of folk-pop perfection on display in ‘To Friend a Friend’, but the album goes by so quickly that you’d hardly even notice it.
Despite some connotations with psychedelic recording techniques, Petty thought the record represented a major leap forward for him artistically, saying, “Wildflowers, though I wouldn’t think that was a psychedelic record, it really brought us up a few notches in understanding how to get exactly what we wanted on the tape. We won a Grammy for the best-engineered album, and we liked that.”
But for all of the raw musicianship on display, it does tend to feel like a carefully constructed studio creation half the time. Take the title track, for example. On its own, someone could play that on acoustic guitar, and it would sound fine, but if you listen a little closely, everything from the drumming to the piano to the orchestra in the background is playing its own kind of hook layered on top of each other.
In essence, what Wildflowers did was the same thing that Damn the Torpedoes accomplished for Petty in the late 1970s. After years of being known as another dad rock act, this cinematic portrayal of his songs made him equally as important a cultural force in the 1990s as any grunge act could have hoped to be.
Petty always played the same game that artists like Eddie Vedder did around the time of the Wildflowers. He stuck to his principles and never once tried to budge, and Wildflowers is the ultimate example of doing what you want in the studio and still making out like a bandit.
