‘Wildflowers’: the Tom Petty album that will be remembered in 100 years
Any artist is going to want to have those few albums that they know are going to last for multiple generations. Bands that spend their entire life chasing trends are always going to find themselves struggling to find some sort of identity, but by the time Tom Petty reached the end of the 1970s, he had already established himself as the kind of person that any rock and roll star could recognise the minute he came on the radio. While Petty was never afraid of his pedigree as a rock and roll star, Wildflowers was the moment where the real depth came in.
This is strange because this should have been the era that killed Petty’s career. Any band that had sustained themselves through the late 1970s all through the MTV generation had no business making more hits in the era of grunge, but Petty fit in surprisingly well. After all, he was the kind of guy who didn’t take shit from anyone, and that made him as much of a forefather to the genre as Neil Young was.
But Wildflowers doesn’t get its accolades for simply being a great rock record for the alternative crowd. Petty spent years trying to fine-tune his songs until they were perfect, and in Rick Rubin, he found the person who could make the music breathe in the right way. Compared to the details behind everything, Wildflowers sounds like it was recorded in a few days, or at least that’s what the production wants you to think.
There are a lot of open sounds that come from the Heartbreakers playing live, but what Petty was doing in the background was miles above anyone’s expectations. He had taken all that time with the Traveling Wilburys to heart, and every track on the record offered a different window into his artistic self. Some of them are sung in the first person, and some of them tell a story, but there is no doubt that every one of them captures a brief glimpse of what he is all about.
Some pieces of the record may have been a bit too close for comfort, considering he would get divorced directly afterwards, but a tune like ‘To Find a Friend’ may as well have been a way for him to cushion the blow. The whole tune is three minutes long with a complex story of a man who leaves his family on a whim, but the mantra of days going by like paper in the wind really says it all for the record. The life of a musical troubadour isn’t for everyone, but it does lead to some faint hints of beauty.
And given how many styles Petty could do, Wildflowers has all of them in spades. The rockabilly heart that he had was always going to find a home on tunes like ‘Cabin Down Below’ and ‘Honey Bee’, but aside from a few soft rockers like ‘Time To Move On’, the best tunes are about setting up a scene within a few minutes, especially when he pulls out all the stops towards the end of the record like on the cinematic ending ‘Wake Up Time’ or the musical air behind ‘Crawling Back To You’.
There might be a few tracks that shine above the rest, but the title track really is where everything comes together. Because after all of the heartache that he talks about or the strange detours that he took his audience down, this tune is about the pure heart he had underneath that sun-soaked beard, wishing everyone in his life well in whatever state they were in.
But when I talk about the album lasting over 100 years, it has to do with something much more than the songs. There are a lot of moments that will leave someone shellshocked no matter what generation they happen to come from, but people who pass this off as nothing but dad rock are missing the point. This is a man laying himself bare for the world to see, and given how many people continue to return, the name of the album is a lot more accurate. A field of wildflowers might seem like a simple canvas to work off of, but if there’s one thing that Petty knew how to do, it was to bring out the beauty in simplicity.
