Tom Petty’s ‘Wildflowers & All the Rest’: Watch Prev. Unreleased Live Clip
by Best Classic Bands Staff
Photo: Mark Seliger; used with permission
Tom Petty’s solo masterpiece, Wildflowers, has finally received an expanded release. The multi-format set, titled Wildflowers & All the Rest, arrived Oct. 16 on Warner Records, and features a Super Deluxe Edition with 70 tracks including nine unreleased songs and 34 unreleased versions, available on either 5-CDs or 9-LPs. (See below for the track listing and to hear many of the songs.)
On Nov. 22, previously unreleased footage of the title track from a 1995 concert was made available. The performance is from the Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ concert at Louisville Gardens in Kentucky on February 28 of that year, as part of the band’s Dogs With Wings tour. It’s also notable for being their first performance to feature drummer Steve Ferrone. (He had replaced the group’s original drummer, Stan Lynch, the previous year.)
Watch “Wildflowers” from Feb. 28, 1995
One highlight from & All the Rest is its lead track, “Something Could Happen,” which fits right in with the Petty canon. Even with its spare production, it sounds like a song that would have been a favorite with concert audiences.
Watch the song’s official video, which wasn’t released until Dec. 8
The set includes Petty’s version of “Leave Virginia Alone” which was written in 1993, and had been previously recorded and released by Rod Stewart in 1995.
Watch the official video for Petty’s “Leave Virginia Alone,” directed by Mark Seliger and Adria Petty
On Sept. 10, the first new previously unreleased song, “Confusion Wheel,” was shared on streaming services. The song was written in 1994 and, notes the announcement, “eerily captures the uncertainty of 2020 as if it were written yesterday and somehow twists it with infinite hope.”
A Deluxe Edition of Wildflowers & All the Rest, on 4-CDs or 7-LPs, features 54 tracks. The release is also available as a 2-CD and 3-LP set, with 25 tracks.
The collection includes 14 live tracks on its fourth disc. One of them is “Walls,” which was first featured in the soundtrack Petty did for the 1996 film, She’s The One.
Later on that same disc is a great live version of “You Wreck Me,” one of the original Wildflower album’s highlights.
On the day of the collection’s Aug. 20 announcement, a video for the home recording of “Wildflowers” was released.
The official announcement came nearly two months after his daughter, Adria Petty, confirmed it in an interview on June 25 on the Tom Petty Channel on SiriusXM.
Watch the collection’s official trailer
The original album was released on Nov. 1, 1994, and produced by Petty, Rick Rubin and the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell. (It had inexplicably been out of print for several years.)
When Adria Petty first shared the news, the collection, still referred to as “the Wildflowers project,” was “still not ready,” but a first release – a home demo of his “You Don’t Know How it Feels” – was premiered on the channel during the June 25 interview. Listen to it and many others below.
The Super Deluxe Edition includes a Rick Rubin introduction, a David Fricke essay, track-by-track for all music and lyrics to all the songs, a hardbound book, cloth patch of Wildflowers logo, sticker of Wildflowers logo, replica of “Dogs with Wings” tour program (the 1995 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers tour), hand-written 4-song lyric reprints in a vellum envelope, a litho of new and exclusive art by Blaze Ben Brooks for the song “Only A Broken Heart,” and a (numbered) Certificate of Authenticity.
Tom Petty—Wildflowers & All The Rest Super Deluxe Edition Track Listing
CD1 – Wildflowers
Wildflowers
You Don’t Know How It Feels
Time to Move On
You Wreck Me
It’s Good to Be King
Only a Broken Heart
Honey Bee
Don’t Fade on Me
Hard on Me
Cabin Down Below
To Find a Friend
A Higher Place
House in the Woods
Crawling Back to You
Wake Up Time
CD2 All The Rest
Something Could Happen
Leaving Virginia Alone
Climb That Hill Blues
Confusion Wheel
California
Harry Green
Hope You Never
Somewhere Under Heaven
Climb That Hill
Hung Up and Overdue
CD3 Home Recordings
There Goes Angela (Dream Away)
You Don’t Know How It Feels
California
A Feeling of Peace
Leave Virginia Alone
Crawling Back to You
Don’t Fade on Me
Confusion Wheel
A Higher Place
There’s a Break in the Rain (Have Love Will Travel)
To Find a Friend
Only a Broken Heart
Wake Up Time
Hung Up and Overdue
Wildflowers
“There Goes Angela (Dream Away),” premiered on the Petty Channel on Aug. 5. The demo, for the previously unreleased song, was recorded at his home in 1992, more than two years before Wildflowers was released on Nov. 1, 1994.
The track features Petty accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica. “Have a dream on me,” sings Petty.
CD4 Wildflowers Live
You Don’t Know How It Feels
Honey Bee
To Find a Friend
Walls
Crawling Back to You
Cabin Down Below
Drivin’ Down to Georgia
House in the Woods
Girls on LSD
Time to Move On
Wake Up Time
It’s Good to Be King
You Wreck Me
Wildflowers
CD5 Alternate Versions (Finding Wildflowers)
A Higher Place
Hard on Me
Cabin Down Below
Crawling Back to You
Only a Broken Heart
Drivin’ Down to Georgia
You Wreck Me
It’s Good to Be King
House in the Woods
Honey Bee
Girl on LSD
Cabin Down Below (Acoustic Version)
Wildflowers
Don’t Fade on Me
Wake Up Time
You Saw Me Comin’
With some reported estate squabbles settled, the Wildflowers project was overseen by Adria and her sister AnnaKim, in conjunction with Petty’s widow, Dana, and the Heartbreakers. Though the LP’s 25th anniversary passed in 2019, the new collection was worth the wait.
An expanded release of Wildflowers had been discussed for quite some time. Adria Petty said, “[We look forward to putting] this masterpiece in the framing that it deserved.” The finished set will include home recordings and demos. The team decided to put the “You Don’t Know How it Feels” demo out now because “fans have been waiting for this for such a long time,” she said.
“We don’t have my dad’s brilliant ears and eyes,” she said, “but as we were playing the demos, this one put everyone feeling really good. We get to [hear] my dad unpolished. This song is really cool because you see it coming right out of his notebook.”
The news had been teased earlier this summer on Petty’s website and on YouTube, which featured an image of a wolf-like figure dressed in human clothing with the phrase “Most Things That I Worry ‘Bout Never Happen Anyway,” a lyric from the album’s “Crawling Back to You.” As a result, the members of the Facebook group Tom Petty Nation speculated on what the release would entail.
Petty died on October 2, 2017, one week to the day after he and the Heartbreakers completed their 40th anniversary tour.
In our Album Rewind of Wildflowers, our reviewer called it Petty’s “finest hour as a recording artist and darkest as a songwriter.” The Nov. 1, 1994 release was his 10th album and first under a new contract with Warner Bros. Records. Among the original’s 15 songs are such Petty favorites as “You Don’t Know How it Feels,” “You Wreck Me,” “Time to Move On,” and the beautiful title cut.
Watch the video for the home recording of “You Don’t Know How it Feels”
1 Comment so far
Jump into a conversationCan’t wait for all the rest. Tom Petty’s music lives forever and may the man Rest In Peace. He was loved and is missed.