Tom Petty - Wildflowers & All The Rest Deluxe Edition Box Set (7LP)

Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time - Rated 214/500

During Tom Petty's final interview with the Los Angeles Times, as the triumphant 40th anniversary tour with The Heartbreakers was coming to an end, he announced that his next big focus would be to finally revisit his 1994 masterpiece, Wildflowers, co-produced with Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell.

Wildflowers in many ways changed Tom's creative life - as a recording artist, collaborator and band leader - while a profound, personal crisis transformed the stories and emotional thrust in his songs. Tom ultimately wrote more songs than he could release at the time. In fact, Tom, Rubin and Campbell completed the album as a double CD with 25 songs, nearly two hours of music, but his label advised restraint. Released on November 1, 1994, Wildflowers - a single CD with 15 songs, still more than an hour in length - was Tom's most acutely confessional album to date.

The resurrection of Wildflowers has been a long time coming. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone Tom detailed his plans for the reissue, telling the magazine, "I broke through to something else. My personal life came crashing down, and it derailed me for a while. But I was at the top of my game during that record." Then again in 2016 on SiriusXM's Tom Petty Radio, he discussed his desire for a Wildflowers tour to coincide with a reissue. Tom had always intended to release the second half of the album - a collection he named All The Rest, featuring ten songs from the Wildflowers recording sessions that were left off the original version and five unreleased tracks (different versions of four other songs would appear on the soundtrack to the 1996 film, She's The One).

Wildflowers & All The Rest, the long-awaited Wildflowers reissue and comprehensive collection, will be released on October 16, 2020 via Warner Records. Tom's vision of the project is becoming a reality due to the commitment of his loving family, bandmates and collaborators who helped unearth many previously unheard gems. The compilation was curated by Tom's daughters, Adria and Annakim Petty and his wife Dana Petty who call it, "Many, many hours of pure sonic joy," as well as Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and was produced by Tom's longtime engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate. Together they stewarded the warmth Tom created through his music and relationship to his fans.

Adria Petty also oversaw the creative direction for the Wildflowers project, with original packaging illustrations by Blaze Ben Brooks, original cover beadwork by Maria Sarno, as well as Wildflowers-era photography by Mark Seliger, Robert Sebree and Martyn Atkins.

The 7 LP 140g deluxe edition of Wildflowers contains 54 tracks, 7 unreleased songs, and 25 unreleased alternate versions. In addition to the 15 track original album (remastered on two LPs), the deluxe edition contains the album All The Rest (10 songs from the original Wildflowers sessions), a double LP of 15 solo demos recorded by Petty at his home studio, and an additional double LP of 14 live versions of Wildflowers songs recorded from 1995 - 2017. The deluxe packaging includes a 60-page book, an introduction by Rick Rubin (the original producer), an essay by David Fricke, a complete track-by-track, and rare photos and specially commissioned illustrations.

Its a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes this box set feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. Like the album itself, these recordings are fascinating, fun, and sometimes unsettlingly intimate.