Watch Great Video For Tom Petty’s ‘Finding Wildflowers’ Release
by Best Classic Bands Staff
Photo: Mark Seliger, via TomPetty.com
Tom Petty fans had to wait years before the official release of the much-discussed expanded version of his solo masterpiece, Wildflowers, saw the light of day. Wildflowers & All the Rest, featuring numerous home recordings and alternate takes from the original 1994 album was released on Oct. 16, 2020, in a variety of editions. Now, Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) featuring tracks from the Super Deluxe edition of All the Rest, has been released as its own collection. The CD arrived April 16, 2021, via Warner Records.
To celebrate the May 7 arrival of the 2-LP vinyl edition, a new video was released for “Drivin’ Down to Georgia.” The clip, directed by Alison Tavel, features archival footage by Martyn Atkins and Heartbreaker Ron Blair.
Foot tappin’ time…
On March 4, “You Saw Me Comin’,” a previously unreleased song and recording from 1992 and the final track on the collection, premiered alongside a video directed by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and Katie Malia. Reflecting upon recording “You Saw Me Comin’” for Wildflowers, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench notes, “There’s this kind of longing in the song, in the way that he wrote the chord structure, the melody and the lyrics. It’s wistful, and it would have been the perfect way to end the disc.”
The songs on Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) first initiated the Petty estate’s discovery and curation process for the larger All the Rest project. The new collection features 16 studio recordings of alternate takes, long cuts and jam versions of Wildflowers songs as Petty, band members and co-producer Rick Rubin worked to finalize the album in 1994. The release, says the announcement, “offers fans further deep access into the writing and recording of Wildflowers, as well as realizing the full vision of the project as Petty had always intended.”
Listen to the alternate version of “You Wreck Me”
The collection was produced by Petty’s longtime engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate who listened to 245 reels of 24-track tape, revealing Petty and his collaborators’ evolutionary process and finding the group willing to do whatever it took to discover the essence and magic in the material.
Listen to the alternate version of the title track, complete with a false start
Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) Track Listing
1. A Higher Place
2. Hard on Me
Petty in the video for “Drivin’ Down to Georgia”
3. Cabin Down Below
4. Crawling Back to You
5. Only a Broken Heart
6. Drivin’ Down to Georgia
7. You Wreck Me
8. It’s Good to Be King
9. House in the Woods
10. Honey Bee
11. Girl on LSD
12. Cabin Down Below (Acoustic Version)
13. Wildflowers
14. Don’t Fade on Me
15. Wake Up Time
16. You Saw Me Comin’
Listen to an acoustic version of “Cabin Down Below”
Related: Our Album Rewind of the original Wildflowers
- Christine McVie is Subject of New Biography, ‘Songbird’ - 11/14/2024
- Top Selling Albums of 1973: Come to the Dark Side - 11/13/2024
- Happy Together 2025 Tour Sets Lineup, Shares First Dates - 11/13/2024
1 Comment so far
Jump into a conversationThis is nice. It helps us who can’t afford big box sets to buy a portion of it. Hopefully they will do this with some of the other songs from the box set.