Tom Petty's Lost Treasures

After a legal battle, the late singer’s family and bandmates finally share ‘Wildflowers’ the way he wanted it to be heard

- DAVID BROWNE

During the last week of his life, Tom Petty grew unusually wistful. Home after a tour with the Heartbreakers, he had his wife, Dana, call up his rarely seen 2002 “Fun in the Desert” video, then asked her to track down a high school girlfriend on social media. “He hated Facebook,” Dana Petty recalls. “But he got super-nostalgic. Looking back, it’s very strange.”

Little from his musical past tugged at him more than Wildflowers, the 1994 solo album that contained some of his most intimate, relaxed, and revealing songs, from “You Don’t Know How It Feels” to the wispy title folk song. With the help of producer Rick Rubin, the album became one of Petty’s most beloved and sonically expansive works. “He would always say, ‘That’s the best rec ord we ever made,” says Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. “It was a period when song after song was coming, which doesn’t always happen 20 years after your first release.”

When Petty first submitted the 25track Wildflowers to Warner Bros., the label, including then-President Lenny Waronker, suggested he trim it back to one disc. As Petty told Rolling Stone in an unpublished interview from 2013, “Lenny listened to it and said, ‘It’s great, but it’s too long — you need to cut it down.’ We were like, ‘Oh, man, we wanted a double album.’ ” Petty acquiesced, relegating roughly half the album to his archives, although a few of the outtakes would end up on the soundtrack of the 1996 Edward Burns rom-com She’s the One.