The last time we saw him, Thomas Earl Petty was where he was born to be. And I miss him and will love him through all my lifetimes every day … - Adria Petty on her Instagram page, Oct. And yet: “The discovery and the fact that there is so much good music and it is not by any means some leftover curiosity that you want to hear one time…that’s the sweet part.October brought him. “Of course, listening to this stuff was a little bittersweet,” Benmont Tench tells Apple Music. But for an artist who sounded poised even when he ventured being casual, it’s the demos that hit deepest, particularly “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” and “Hung Up and Overdue”-stark, beautiful songs that show a side of Petty he’d never quite showed before. The material on the original double-album version is robust: “Leave Virginia Alone” mines the same ambivalent nostalgia as “Wildflowers” “Something Could Happen” is a companion to “Wake Up Time” “Confusion Wheel” is a bluesy, almost Appalachian-sounding song that showed the band’s still-sharp teeth. But the material was there, and in late 2020 was finally issued under the banner Wildflowers & All the Rest, alongside another, even larger set including home-recorded demos and a collection of live versions of Wildflowers songs spanning 1995 to Petty’s death in 2017. He’d wanted to make Wildflowers a double album, but Warner Bros. Petty was, by all accounts, in a generative mind-Rick Rubin said he once paused the tape while playing back a demo and wrote an entirely new song, end to end, in a few minutes. But like the songbird whose song only grows in complexity the less noise he has to compete with (it’s true), he was finding nuance in his solitude, and was lucky enough to keep company with a flock who could hold the space. Petty was writing from a quieter place now. Or it really doesn't sound like anything except the guy singing.” The magic, of course, is that despite the effort and attention, Wildflowers sounds natural and unforced-a sense of intuitiveness attributed, in part, to the influence of new producer Rick Rubin. They're all these little things that make the textures a little bit fuller, but never make it sound like a wall of sound. “I didn’t for decades know that there are lines in songs where Mike doubled the piano with something called Marxophone. “It’s a really special record because it has these little surprising things you wouldn't notice,” Heartbreakers lifer Benmont Tench tells Apple Music. The subtext being that it’s a kingdom of one. “It’s good to be king/And have your own way,” Petty sings on “It’s Good to Be King.” Sure. When they rock-“You Wreck Me,” “Honey Bee”-they do it like desperate men. And when the friends do show up (“You Don’t Know How It Feels”), you suddenly run cold and self-protective. “Wildflowers” isn’t just a metaphor for beauty, but a beauty you can’t possess without ruining it. After two decades of marriage, Petty was heading toward divorce-a personal cataclysm even more pronounced on 1999’s Echo, but you could hear the heartbreak coming. For an artist who built his career on a certain degree of stubbornness, Wildflowers wasn’t just an admission of vulnerability, it was like standing naked.
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