Let's POLL Another Joint: Tom Petty WILDFLOWERS

been meaning to do this one, the '94 rock albums thread reminded me.

the last good petty album, i think. (there are songs i like on she's the one, but that's only sort of barely an album anyway.) haven't actually listened to this in a long time, i need to revisit it.

(among other things, i was really happy for the rick rubin production after all that jeff lynne stuff.)

You Don't Know How It Feels was the theme song to many a stoner session during my freshman year of college.

"Crawling Back To You" – one of my favorites songs by anyone. It's made many a mixtape/CD-R.

yeah that's a nice one. good performance of it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL4ThLS7F94

"wake up time" is really pretty too. the album ends well.

Petty's favorite album, by the way.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

This was a staple in my design studio back in college, it always seemed to get put on around 4 or 5 in the morning during yet another all-nighter, so "Wake Up Time" always took on a weird significance hearing it as the sun was coming up and the world would be coming alive again. So I'm voting for that, even though there are a good 5 or 6 others I could argue for.

yeah i ended up voting for that too.

The review in the latest RS album guide says the album evokes Neil Young in its casualness -- it's casual without getting limp (most of the time). Certainly it's true of the first third.

the middle is a little saggy i guess, but i like most of the songs well enough. things like "don't fade on me" and "to find a friend," i usually forget about them until they come on, but they're pretty nice.

love this album. i received it for my birthday 15 years ago!

title track is kinda perfect

Recorded in one take!

yeah? those dudes are pros!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i like the vote for "honey bee," good tune.

Are you starting the next poll, tipsy?

what would be the next one? "let me up"? anyway, you can do it if you want. or i can. i'm not proprietary.

20th anniversary is this fall. This album has aged beautifully, and I like it tons more now than I did in '94.

The deluxe reissue didn't make the 20th anniversary, but one of the "lost songs" is up on Spotify. "Somewhere Under Heaven" is pretty good on first listen.

https://play.spotify.com/album/01mdqLTNOrWIMRIAJUQZgD

Does the reissue include all those tracks that didn't make the record, or are they on that thing called Mo Wildflowers or whatever?

I believe the additional ten tracks are going to be on the reissue.

I'm so tired of being tired
Sure as night will follow day
Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway

:(

Finally the expanded version? My wallet is ready for this.

https://www.stereogum.com/2089262/tom-petty-you-dont-know-how-it-feels-demo/music/

Nothing official yet, but:

“The family and the band are in a joyful process of discovering the Wildflowers sessions and demos and wanted to share a tiny bit of that with the fans today,” Adria Petty said when debuting the track on SiriusXM’s Tom Petty Radio channel.

Revisited the album plus the outtakes. Nothing's really bad, but I don't think cutting down the album was a bad idea either - if anything, they should've pared it down even more as I don't think there's enough top-drawer songs to sustain an hour's worth of listening. (At minimum, I could've done without the lumbering "Cabin Down Below" and "House in the Woods" and would rather have the middle section settle into an unbroken run of sad, moody little numbers.)

One of his better ones, but I still prefer Damn the Torpedoes and Full Moon Fever.

"Crawling Back To You" – one of my favorites songs by anyone. It's made many a mixtape/CD-R.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 15, 2010

My kid wrote a song on piano and it has the same riff in the same key as “cabin down below.” He couldn’t believe it

I’m so tired of being tired
Sure as night will follow day

"Crawling Back To You" – one of my favorites songs by anyone. It's made many a mixtape/CD-R.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 15, 2010

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 12, 2023 3:16 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think crawling back to you is my favorite petty song

Yeah, that's a really good track. I really think the album's a whole lot stronger without "Cabin Down Below," "House in the Woods" and even "Honey Bee" in there breaking up that mindset of a guy who's mentally circling what's become the clear and imminent dissolution of his marriage, like he's slowly going down a drain. That stretch from "Only a Broken Heart" through "Wake Up Time" works better without them, and "Crawling Back To You" works especially well in that context. I guess "Honey Bee" can arguably fit in there as some kind of lingering memory of lust, but it sounds too incongruous to me - I think it would've been better as a B-side.

“It’s hard to find a friend” might be my favorite

there's some great stuff on here but also some pretty dire stuff. "honey bee" and "cabin down below" - tom petty being horny and leering, no thank you. "crawling back to you" struck me as too mopey and self-indulgent when i got to it, maybe because the middle half of this thing is a bit of a slog.

"wildflowers" and "you don't know how it feels" are top-tier. "it's good to be king" deserved a vote, it's pretty sharply observed imo with a great outro. "time to move on" is lovely.

What do you think of "You Wreck Me"?

i dig it, the riff wins me over and the lyrics are generic enough that i don't object lol.

"it's hard to find a friend" is another one i really like.

"You Wreck Me" is great. It does stick out like a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers track, but it's enjoyable enough that I can't complain.

It's funny, the first five tracks is easily the most engaging and enjoyable stretch of the album, but they could almost be used for another album - the whole point of Wildflowers doesn't really coalesce until you listen through the mopey and bitter ones that come later. ("Time to Move On" does fit in with those but it comes in pretty early as track 3.)

The other problem with "Honey Bee" and "Cabin Down Below" is that they sound like boring fake blues pastiches. Rolling Stone originally compared one of them to CCR/John Fogerty's work, and to be fair, I can kind of hear where they're coming from, but it's missing a crucial element to make it work on that level - Fogerty's vocals. I never had a problem with Petty's vocals, but it doesn't have what Fogerty's voice has to make this stuff work.

i think the riffs have an enjoyable malevolence to them. the electric guitars on this album always sound amazing and the playing is always tasteful. but the subject of those songs is "i have a boner." they're kinda rapey tbh. i don't know solo fogerty but ccr didn't really do that as a subject iirc.

Fogerty might be one of the few white male singer-songwriters who rarely wrote about boners and women.

When Big Thief released their album last year, my first thought was "This reminds me of Wildflowers." Light not shallow, hooky by design, the song craft is so fine that I have trouble separating the casually masterful from the merely casual.

love that connection, Alfred.

"Honey Bee" at least feels almost like an homage to old blues, could be a companion song to "I'm a King Bee" after all. "Cabin Down Below" is completely forgettable but I do enjoy it mostly based on what you said there, map, about how great this record just sounds

I really like the guitar tones on cabin and honey bee

yeah absolutely! those guitars sound amazing.

this album is like digital mastering at its finest

thought it was weird they remastered it. og sounds perfect.

Changing the name from "You Rock Me" to "You Wreck Me" made a big difference for that song. I love it as a kind of throwback Heartbreakers rocker, and it cooked live.

FWIW, the original CD was mastered with quite a bit of digital compression added. When they remastered it for the deluxe set, they actually did three different remasterings: a “loud” version for streaming (using a similar amount of compression), a less-compressed version for the CD release (which does sound better to me than the original CD), and a version with no compression/full dynamic range for vinyl and hi-res digital vendors.

The making of documentary available on Prime comprised of 16mm film they found in 2020 is enjoyable.

Since doing a deep dive on him around the time he died I’ve been struck by how much pain Petty quietly lived with for most of his life – from growing up with an abusive father to living with an unstable spouse to becoming a heroin addict in his late forties. This record (and documentary) kind of reinforces that.

FWIW, I got a hold of the fifth disc from the super deluxe box set, and I have to say I really enjoy the 'alternate' versions of "Cabin Down Below," "Crawling Back to You" and "Honey Bee" that's one there. Stan Lynch plays drums on all three, which means everyone from Petty's Heartbreakers. I replaced the versions on the original album with them and it feels like a noticeable improvement to me. They are not radically different, but I think they're better performances.

The disc also has a version of "House in the Woods" that similarly has all the Heartbreakers performing, and it has an interesting instrumental break that's almost like the Grateful Dead, but I still think it's a weak song. Wish they replaced it with something else, like "Leave Virginia Alone."

*that's on there.