Wildflowers & All The Rest (Remastered) [3xLP]

When he was 44 years old, Tom Petty released his second and greatest solo album. It is a crucial entry to his catalog, one whose songwriting is elegantly spare, personal, and intuitive.

Wildflowers is not Tom Petty’s tightest album, nor his easiest to listen to. There’s hopelessness and anger; disappointment and regret. Its disparate modes—blues, country, folk, power-pop, torch songs—are connected by the roads, both literal and figurative, that led him to where he found himself: lonely, middle-aged, digging through his consciousness as one would ransack a room to find a small, lost object.

“You were so cool back in high school,” he sings smoothly in the last song before switching to his frank, Southern speaking voice: “What happened?” He asks the question and deflates with no hint of poetry or romance, let alone an answer.

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Pitchfork
Tom Petty - Wildflowers & All The Rest (Remastered) Review