Angel Olsen and Hand Habits cover Tom Petty’s “Walls” for Cosmic Stream 2. Filmed at the Masonic Temple in Asheville, NC. Olsen’s flight is both upward and inward. On her vulnerable, The Big Mood new album, we can see her taking anintrospective deep dive towards internal destinations and revelations. In the process of making this album, she found a new sound and voice, a blast of fury mixed with hard won self-acceptance.
First started listening to Angel Olsen with the “Woman”, which is I believe is a classic from 2016, which also included another classic, “All Mirrors,” was another strong release from Olsen & music. I got the vinyl and 24-bit wav files of WNM, and both are stunning. WNM will be among the favourites of 2020. Olsen’s music gives hope to all who suffer hurt, emotional and physical, from ones we love or thought we loved.
Tom Petty fans had to wait years before the official release of the much-discussed expanded version of his solo masterpiece, Wildflowers, saw the light of day. Wildflowers & All the Rest, featuring numerous home recordings and alternate takes from the original 1994 album was released on October. 16th, 2020, in a variety of editions. Now, “Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions)” featuring tracks from the Super Deluxe edition of All the Rest, has been released as its own collection. It arrived April 16th, 2021, via Warner Records; a 2-LP release will follow on May 7th.
“You Saw Me Comin’,” a previously unreleased song and recording from 1992 and the final track on the collection, premiered alongside a video directed by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and Katie Malia. Reflecting upon recording “You Saw Me Comin’” for Wildflowers, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench notes, “There’s this kind of longing in the song, in the way that he wrote the chord structure, the melody and the lyrics. It’s wistful, and it would have been the perfect way to end the disc.”
Tom Petty’s ‘Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions)’ Limited Edition gold vinyl available at TomPetty.com. “Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions)” features 16 studio recordings of alternate takes, long cuts and jam versions of Wildflowers songs as Tom, band members and co-producer Rick Rubin worked to finalize the album in 1994. Check TomPetty.com for more info.
The latest offering of Tom Petty curated with help from his loving family, bandmates and collaborators. Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) features 16 studio recordings of alternate takes, long cuts and jam versions of Wildflowers songs as Tom, band members and co-producer Rick Rubin worked to finalize the album in 1994. The release offers fans further deep access into the writing and recording of Wildflowers, as well as realizing the full vision of the project as Tom had always intended.
“You Saw Me Comin’,” a previously unreleased song and recording from 1992 and the final track on the collection, is premiering alongside a video directed by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and Katie Malia. The songs on Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) first initiated the Petty estate’s discovery and curation process for the larger All the Rest project.
Reflecting on the recording of “You Saw Me Comin’,” Benmont Tench notes, “There’s this kind of longing in the song, in the way that he wrote the chord structure, the melody and the lyrics. It’s wistful, and it would have been the perfect way to end the disc.”
The collection was produced by Petty’s longtime engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate who listened to 245 reels of 24-track tape, revealing Petty and his collaborators’ evolutionary process and finding the group willing to do whatever it took to discover the essence and magic in the material.
The latest installment in Turntable Kitchen’s series of releases featuring artists covering a full album of their choice is one of its most curious: The Pains of Being Pure At Heart tackling Full Moon Fever, the 1989 solo effort by Tom Petty. It’s a novel, unexpected choice for the band considering their core sound, but it’s also one that doesn’t make for the most gentle transition to a shoegaze/dreampop format. The otherwise sturdy songs have been made wispy and empty at their core, with even The Byrds’ “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better” turned into something dippy and fey. The key downfall is Kip Berman’s vocal performances throughout.
He didn’t need to try and replicate the twang-y tones of Petty but Berman makes the wrong choices throughout. He opts for his breathy croon when he should growl, and growls when he should get dreamy. It upends the more inventive moments like the band’s rendering of “A Face In The Crowd” as a synthpop dance classic and “A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own” as Beatles-esque blues. A pleasant diversion that will only inspire revisits to the Petty original. Maybe that was the point all along. Pains’ Kip Berman announced his debut solo EP Know Me More under the name the Natvral. Last year, the band released The Echo of Pleasure.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have covered Tom Petty’s 1989 solo debut Full Moon Fever in its entirety. It’s due out October 25th as part of Turntable Kitchen’s ongoing Sounds Delicious series—a monthly vinyl subscription of full-length cover albums, Full Moon Fever was Petty’s solo debut record and it is absolutely packed with hits. No less than 5 tracks charted on the Billboard Top 100: Free Fallin’, I Won’t Back Down, Runnin’ Down a Dream, Yer So Bad, and A Face in the Crowd. But even the tracks that didn’t chart could have been hits: Love Is A Long Road,Depending On You, A Mind With a Heart of its Own. The same could be said for so many of his albums. This dude’s catalogue is deep.
“Leave Virginia Alone,” the lead single and another previously unreleased song from Tom Petty’s long-awaited second half of Wildflowers—a collection he named All The Rest—is out now. Tom wrote “Leave Virginia Alone” in January 1993—very early in the evolution of Wildflowers.
The song debuts alongside a video co-directed by Mark Seliger and Tom’s daughter Adria Petty. The video stars emerging actress/dancer Casimere Jollette (Netflix’s forthcoming “Tiny Pretty Things”) and was shot around Connecticut as well as in and around Seliger’s studio in New York City.
In speaking with David Fricke on SiriusXM’s Tom Petty Radio, Adria notes, “We were very resourceful about trying to create a character that could be assigned to anyone.
That’s why Virginia in this video is very mysterious but she has her little glimpses of characters. We really worked to cast someone authentic—that felt like they were really feeling their feelings and someone that you could believe. We really wanted the song to do the heavy lifting in this video, and sort of step out of the way and just give it something to breathe with.” Seliger furthers, “The one idea that kept coming back to both of us is that we really want Tom to be narrating the story. We really want to hear his voice as he runs you through this journey that this woman is having.”
Official Music Video for Tom Petty’s “Leave Virginia Alone’ from ‘Wildflowers & All The Rest’ The album, Wildflowers, originally released in 1994, is commonly vaunted as Tom Petty’s most personal, most heartfelt, and most revealing artistic statement of his career. Recorded over the course of two years and originally intended to be a two-disc album, it was perhaps the most creative period in his life. The release of Wildflowers & All The Rest on October 16th, 2020 will finally gather together all 25 songs from the original recording sessions – the 15 songs from Wildflowers, plus the 10 songs that were left off the original release.
The new Tom Petty box set after a long time waiting is finally getting a release, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell tells usthat the group hopes to release a live set commemorating their 1997 residency at the Fillmore in San Francisco. They played 20 sold-out shows at the historic theatre in January and February of that year, radically changing the setlist each night. In 2009, seven songs from the Fillmore run were released on the Live Anthology compilation, but that was just a tiny sampling of their total collection.
“For me, that was almost the pinnacle of the band just being totally spontaneous night to night to night,” says Campbell. “We might throw in a Grateful Dead song that we just learned that afternoon. We recorded every show and we had guest artists from Bo Diddley to Roger McGuinn to John Lee Hooker. And I know, in my memory of those 20 nights, there’s an amazing album in there.”
Tom Petty estate finally release an expanded edition of his 1995 LP solo “Wildflowers”. Petty had said that he wanted to take the Heartbreakers and whoever else to reproduce every sound in a big way,” of that album. That album was really about sound in a big way. The plan was to go out there and perform the entire album as it was originally conceived with all of the songs.”
“Wildflowers” was initially envisioned as a double album, but was ultimately pared down to 15 songs on a single CD release. It became one of the most successful records of his career, with singles “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good To Be King” all getting extensive radio play. For years, Petty has been contemplating assembling the unreleased material into a deluxe package. The Super Deluxe Edition of the set features 70 tracks, spread out over five CDs, with nine songs that have never been released plus 34 alternate versions.
Curated by Tom’s daughters, Adria and Annakim Petty and his wife Dana Petty. A 2-CD set includes 25 songs, with ten previously unreleased cuts. A top of the line Super Deluxe Edition is a sprawling package available in a 5-CD or 9-LP 180g vinyl.
In addition to the original LP, the box contains a disc titled All the Rest that includes 10 outtakes from the sessions, five of which have never been heard. The third disc is comprised of 15 Petty home demos, with three of its 15 songs unreleased. The fourth CD consists of live versions of 14 songs recorded between 1995 and 2017, 12 available for the first time. The fifth disc, Finding Wallflowers, consists of 16 alternate studio versions.
“I think I put four of the [Wildflowers outtakes] on the She’s The One soundtrack just to fill out the album,” says Tom Petty. “But they were very hastily mixed. Take ‘Climb That Hill.’ There’s a version of that on She’s The One, but the Wildflowers one I think is extremely better. ‘Hung Up And Overdue’ is another one remixed and it turned into an epic. Carl Wilson [of the Beach Boys] and [Heartbreakers bassist] Howie Epstein singing quite a bit of harmony that didn’t come through on the original. Then again, there’s probably six songs that nobody has heard. There’s 11 or 12 [new] songs on the album. I think people are going to like it a lot. I like it a lot.”
The new version of Wildflowers will be released. “At one point the label really just wanted to put it out as a standalone album, And then there’s the point of view where they want to put both records together. There’s also the point of view that wants the box set with all the demos and all that.
The Wildflowers box set has been in the works for quite a long time, something that Petty frequently spoke of in his final years. The 1994 album was originally envisioned as a two-disc set, meaning many songs got cut for space when it was truncated. A sweet, tender melodic ballad opens Tom Petty’s acclaimed 1994 album Wildflowers. The title track’s initial chorus reveals a simple desire: freedom.
“You belong among the wildflowers / You belong in a boat out at sea / Sail away, kill off the hours / You belong somewhere you feel free.”
“I swear to god it’s all ad-lib from the word ‘go,’’ Petty told Paul Zollo in his 2005 book, Conversations with Tom Petty. “I turned on my tape deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish. And then sat back and went ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head. It’s a very sweet song. It’s got really good intentions.” Sonically, “Wildflowers” came from a different world than much of Petty’s work from the ’80s. There are no drums on the track at all, and the song features little more than a jangly acoustic guitar, piano, a spot or two of harmony and Petty’s pure vocals. Turning instead to a more stripped-down, raw and natural approach, he entered the studio with his bandmates from the Heartbreakers, unsure exactly of what the result would be. “Wildflowers” arrived like a breath of fresh air, or as Petty put it, a “stream of consciousness.”
“I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song,” the rocker confessed to Zollo. “So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Producer Rick Rubin was also taken aback by the flow of material pouring out of Petty.
“One day, between cassette recordings of songs he was working on, he began strumming the guitar,” said Rubin . “After a couple of minutes of strumming chords, he played me an intricate new song complete with lyrics and story. I asked him what it was about. He said he didn’t know, it just came out. He had written it, or more like channelled it, in that very moment. He didn’t know what it was about or what the inspiration was. It arrived fully formed. It was breath-taking.”
Though Rubin couldn’t remember the exact song Petty played — it could very well have been “Wildflowers” — the producer was amazed by the the ease with which Petty put tunes together. Rubin, also enamoured with the songwriting from Full Moon Fever (1989), would go on to produce the entire Wildflowers record.
“When we first met, I was impressed with his dedication to writing,” the producer recalled. “He wrote constantly and called me to come and hear new songs often. There is a poetry about them that spoke to me.” But that poetry wasn’t immediately clear to Petty when he wrote “Wildflowers,” and the direction the song was taking him was unclear, though he knew his crumbling marriage was likely playing a part.
“I’ve read that Echo is my ‘divorce album’, but Wildflowers is the divorce album,” Petty told biographer Warren Zanes in the 2015 book, Petty: The Biography. “That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it. I don’t go into this stuff with elaborate plans. But I’m positive that’s what Wildflowers is. It just took me getting up the guts to leave this huge empire that we had built, to walk out.” When the title track came tumbling out of his head, Petty didn’t recognize his subject straight away. His therapist asked him who the song was about.
“I told him I wasn’t sure,” the musician recalled to Zanes. “And then he said ‘I know. The song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.’” It appeared the freedom the subject was seeking was Petty’s to find. Whatever had been bottled up inside had come out onto the page and had become an unforgettable three minute song about love and liberation. “It kind of knocked me back,” Petty admitted. “But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.”
Petty had seen the Rolling Stones play Sticky Fingers at the Fonda Theatrer in Los Angeles and noticed they played it completely out of sequence. “Single album concerts often don’t scan right for a concert,” he said. “But with the amount of material I had for the Wildflowers double album, I think I’ve got enough tempos and types of songs that I could do a live show … And it’ll be fun for the audience since there’s a bunch of songs they’ll know.
The album, which features hits like You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good To Be King,” has been due an extensive re-release.
Now that he’s gone, his former collaborators are determined to see the projection to fruition. “I see that in the cards,” says producer Ryan Ulyate. “It’s going to be fantastic.” There’s also talk of deluxe editions of key albums from Petty’s catalogue. “If there’s a market for something like that,” says Campbell, “we’ll do it.”
Wildflowers & All The Rest—Super Deluxe Edition: A 5-CD and 9-LP 180g Direct to Consumer, Limited Edition set that features 70 tracks, nine unreleased songs and 34 unreleased versions. Includes Rick Rubin introduction, David Fricke essay, track-by-track for all music and lyrics to all the songs on Wildflowers and All The Rest. This set also comes with 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 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.
The Tom Petty estate has dug into the late musician’s vault and shared a lost cut from his historic “Wildflower” sessions dubbed “There Goes Angela (Dream Away).” Petty’s family released a demo version of “You Don’t Know How It Feels” in June and confirmed that an expanded version of 1994’s Wildflowers LP was underway. “The family and the band are in a joyful process of discovering the “Wildflowers” sessions and demos.
Another track from Tom Petty’s long-awaited Wildflowers box has been released. It’s a demo made at home for the song, The cut premiered today on Petty’s SiriusXM station, with Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and engineer George Drakoulias showing up on David Fricke’s program for the debut. This acts as yet another teaser of a new Wildflowers celebratory release, to be an “exhaustive chronicle of the making of one of Petty’s most enduring albums.”
As Adria Petty explained in June, “The family and all our engineers and the Heartbreakers have been circling around this project and making it as delightful and completist as possible. We’re really pleased to be able to share the second half of the Wildflowers double album. But there are also completist versions of how the sessions evolved. My dad was prolific at that time and there was so much recording done.”
No further details about the expanded version of Wildflowers have surfaced yet, but Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell has speculated that the band could regroup to perform the record when it finally does come out. “It would be a great tribute to Tom just to do that album,” he said. “We’d probably have four or five different guest singers with us. We don’t know who they might be, though, or when this might happen.”
Interestingly, the only way to access “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” is to complete a short Tom Petty quiz.
Tom Petty’s solo masterpiece, “Wildflowers”, will be getting an expanded release. The news was confirmed by his daughter, Adria Petty, in an interview (June 25) on the Tom Petty Channel on SiriusXM. The collection, still referred to as “the Wildflowers project,” “is 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 interview.
With some reported estate squabbles settled, the project is being 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, fans will likely savour what’s to come. Adria Petty was careful not to make a hard promise on a specific date for the release but the team is aiming for 2020. In the years since Tom Petty released his landmark Wildflowers album, much has been said about the Rick Rubin-helmed sessions and how much unreleased material was left behind as the album evolved. Petty originally had enough songs to release Wildflowers as a double-album – reportedly with at least 26 songs – but was persuaded against it. In 2015, he released a preview track, “Somewhere Under Heaven,” for the release provisionally entitled Wildflowers: All The Rest. But the collection was shelved after his death.
An expanded release of Wildflowers has 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 long rumoured projected had often been referred to as Wildflowers and All the Rest.
The news had been teased 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 spent much of Thursday afternoon speculating on what the release would entail.
Tom Petty died on October 2nd, 2017, one week to the day after he and the Heartbreakers completed their 40th anniversary tour.
“Wildflowers”, was called Petty’s “finest hour as a recording artist and darkest as a songwriter.” The November. 1st, 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 “Wildflowers”.
Steve Nicks visited Atlantic Records‘ president Doug Morris and made her pitch for her first solo record: “So, listen, what I’d really like to do is be in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ band. He said, ‘No. That’s not going to happen.'” She then asked: “So I can make, like, a Tom Petty girl album?” And so she made the album “Bella Donna”.
Bella Donna would mark the beginning of Nicks’ trend of calling upon her many musician friends and connections to fully realize her sparse demo recordings. Along with friends Tom Petty and Don Henley, Nicks brought in session musician Waddy Wachtel, Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band pianist Roy Bittan, and Stax session man Donald “Duck” Dunn of Booker T. & the MGs.
Though Bella Donna personnel list includes some 20 musicians, the album is very much Nicks’ own work, with all but one of the songs on the record written by her. The album also marked the first recording featuring Nicks’ backing vocalists, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, who still record and tour with Nicks today.
Tom Petty met Nicks while he was recording his group’s album “Damn The Torpedoes”. She asked him half-jokingly if he could write her a song that she could record for her first solo album. Petty didn’t take her request seriously at first, but Nicks reiterated her request a year later as Petty was putting together his “Hard Promises” album. Petty had wrote a ballad called “Insider” at his home, played it to the Heartbreakers (to their approval), recorded a demo with his band, and sent the demo to Nicks. After listening to the demo of “Insider,” Nicks visited Petty at his studio, taped the song with Petty and the Heartbreakers, then gave the tape to Petty, saying, “You love this so much… You take the song.” He did, and included it on Hard Promises.
Shortly after Insider was finished, Petty and company recorded a song that he and guitarist Mike Campbell had composed about a year earlier…“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” – and sent that demo to Nicks’ then producer, Jimmy Iovine. She loved it, saying, “That’s what I wanted all along.” Nicks and Petty ended up doing it as a duet.
Chrissie Hynde would often sing the Petty role in this song when she toured with Stevie Nicks in the ’00s. They would have a lot of fun with the song..
This song is about a couple with a complicated relationship. She wants to get rid of him, but he has a hold on her heart. When she tells him to stop dragging that heart around, he explains that he’s just trying to protect her, as “you need someone looking after you.”
Many of the songs Nicks has sung over the years involve hearts in different states of breaking, and many are about her intimate relationships, written either by her or her Fleetwood Mac bandmate/soulmate, Lindsey Buckingham. This song is one of the few she could sing without dealing with the emotional baggage behind it, as it has nothing to do with her personally. Nicks wanted Petty to produce “Bella Donna”. He gave it a shot, but it didn’t work out and Jimmy Iovine was brought in. This created an interesting dynamic as Iovine and Nicks began living together while they were making the album.
This was the biggest hit for either Stevie Nicks (as a solo act) or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (who had a competing single out at the time “Woman In Love” – that didn’t chart) In addition to being The Heartbreakers’ guitarist, Mike Campbell has played on albums by many other artists, including several by Stevie Nicks. He told us how this came together: “I had written the music and Tom had written the words. The Heartbreakers had recorded a version of it with Jimmy Iovine, and Jimmy being the entrepreneur that he was, he was working with Stevie, and I guess he asked Tom if she could try it, and it just developed from there. We cut the track as a Heartbreakers record and when she decided to do it we used that track and she came in and sang over it.”
This had the good fortune of being released around the time MTV went on the air. They didn’t have many videos at the time, so this got a lot of airplay. It introduced a younger audience to Nicks and Petty.
Bella Donna was Nicks’ first solo album. Her output with Fleetwood Mac sold extremely well, but solo success was hardly ensured. When Nicks finished the album, her producer Jimmy Iovine told her she didn’t have a single, and if she didn’t record “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “your record’s going to tank and then you’re not going to have a solo career.” Nicks was dismayed about removing one of the songs on the album to make room for the track, but she took Iovine’s advice. “I went home and said, ‘You’ve got to drop this self-esteem you’ve got going on right now and realize that the whole reason you even hired Jimmy Iovine was because he produced Tom Petty and you always wanted to be in Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers,“Nicks said while introducing the song in concert. “I said: ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ So, anyway, ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart’ became a huge single, all because Tom Petty was generous enough to give me that song.”
The song was released as the first single setting the stage for more hits. The next single was another duet: “Leather And Lace” with Don Henley, which reached #6. It wasn’t until the third single that Nicks was finally on her own: “Edge Of Seventeen”.
A few years after this was released, Dave Stewart of Euryhmics wrote “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which he and Iovine started producing for Nicks. By this time, Iovine and Nicks had broken up, and when she came over to work on the song, things didn’t go well and she stormed out. Iovine brought in Tom Petty and they completed the song with him, something Nicks knew was fair considering “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” went on her album.
On her 2001 album Trouble In Shangri-La, Nicks thanked Petty in the liner notes. She asked him to write another song for her, but he refused and encouraged her to write it herself. After that conversation, she started writing songs for the album. Tom Petty had a connection to another song on the album. His wife, Jane, told Nicks that she was “at the age of 17” when she met Tom. Like her husband, Jane was from Gainesville, Florida, and had such a strong country accent that Stevie thought she said “edge of 17,” which provided the title for one of her most popular songs.In the liner notes to her Time Space album, Stevie Nicks said: “Jimmy (Iovine) played this song to me while he was still finishing Tom’s album; it was one of those songs that Tom was not going to do, and he told Jim that I could do it. I wasn’t used to doing other people’s songs, so I didn’t really like the idea at first, but I loved Tom Petty, so I agreed to try. So we went into the studio and sang it live, together. I was completely entranced, and I instantly fell into love with the song. Duets were the things I loved the most… maybe this was a second beginning. And we would sing like no one else, and nobody else would ever sing like us.”
Petty and Nicks reunited to perform this song when Petty was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 10th, 2017. Before giving her induction speech, Harry Styles sang this with Nicks when she entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 as a solo artist.
US indie guitar hero J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr) has unleashed a incendiary cover of legendary classic hits mainstays Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers‘ awesome rocking hit ‘Don’t Do Me Like That‘. The oft-languid Mascis summons hidden energy reserves for his fiery yet soulful rendition, conjuring majestic guitar solos and crunchy riffage like the axe-wielding wizard he is. The standalone release follows Mascis‘ 2018 solo album “Elastic Days” and drops in advance of a heady tour season for the artist, who’s gearing up for shows in Japan, the UK and Europe. Dive into his reimagining cover of ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’
J Mascis covers Tom Petty’s “Don’t Do Me Like That”
Tom Petty released “Somewhere Under Heaven,” co-written with Mike Campbell for 1994’s Wildflowers but left unheard until now. The track, available for purchase now through digital retailers, which will be part of a new archival project titled Wildflowers: All the Rest.
Even a brief listen to “Somewhere Under Heaven” places it firmly in context with the original album’s layered complexity. You can hear a sample of the new song above. The three-times platinum Wildflowers, a No. 8 hit that marked the first of three Petty albums co-produced by Rick Rubin, moved with deceptive grace from brawny rockers (“You Wreck Me,” “Cabin Down Below,” “Honey Bee”) to acoustic fragility (the title track, “Time to MoveOn”) to moving longform narratives (“It’s Good to be King,” “Crawling Back to You”).
And apparently there was much more where that came from. The release of Wildflowers: All the Rest, which features songs written between 1992-94, apparently corrects a wrong that goes back more than two decades. Petty says Wildflowers was originally intended to be a double album.
“Somewhere Under Heaven” can also be heard during the closing credits for the movie Entourage, which opens this week. Petty’s last studio album, Hypnotic Eye, became his first-ever U.S. No. 1. It was also his highest-charting U.K. release since Wildflowers went Top 10 20 years ago..
The track was recorded for 1994’s Wildflowers, which will see a second disc from those sessions called Wallflowers: All the Rest hit shelves at some point in the future. But Petty was quick to point out that these aren’t outtakes.
“The original plan was to release it as as the complete Wildflowers album with the original album and this,” he said. “And Warner Bros. came back to us and said, ‘Look, this is far too good a record to just send straight to the catalog racks. We’re going to put it out as its own album.’ I was behind that decision too. It’s done and we’re eventually going to put it out. It’s just sitting there finished,
Several of The Best of Everything’s 38 songs, including “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” are plucked from Petty’s beloved solo album Wildflowers, which was released on this day in 1994. To commemorate Wildflowers’ 24th anniversary,
While there’s no word on the long-promised expanded edition of Tom Petty’s 1994 album Wildflowers, we have some new insight of the sessions courtesy of its producer, Rick Rubin. In a new interview, he discussed the recording of the tracks and how Petty was “haunted” by its legacy.
As Rubin told Malcolm Gladwell on their Broken Record podcast (embedded below), the genesis for Wildflowers came from the sessions that resulted in the bonus tracks for the Heartbreakers‘ 1993 compilation, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and the cover of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air.” After the meticulous work they did with Jeff Lynne, Rubin freed them in the studio, and it resulted in what Rubin called a more “organic” sound, that “felt more alive and more human,” and they decided to continue working together.
It was a particularly “fertile” and “prolific” period in Petty’s career, as Rubin noted. Plus, Petty was eager to please his new producer and open to suggestions. “Hope You Never,” one of the leftovers that wound up on the She’s the One soundtrack, was a particular example.
“We did that very in a straightforward way, kind of almost Jeff Lynne-y drumwise,” he said. “Very straight. And we probably played that a bunch of different ways before we decided, ‘Oh, we like it this way.’ [We] probably played it more like band-style and then it’s like, ‘This lends itself more to the kind of hypnotic, locked-in sound.’ It’s a more down-tempo, moody piece, sort of the sarcastic Tom — ‘I hope you never fall in love with somebody like you.'”
Rubin said that they recorded “between 26 and 28 songs,” but Warner Bros. felt a single LP would have greater commercial potential. Petty, who repeatedly fought with his former label MCA, agreed with his new bosses and they went about figuring out which songs to include and in what order. Wildflowers was eventually released in November 1994 with 15 tracks. But Petty always hoped to put out the others.
“He thought it was really important because the legacy of the Wildflowers album loomed large in his career,” Rubin continued. “And he knew that the second half of Wildflowers was an important statement. His issue was [that] he didn’t want to put it out as a new Tom Petty album, ’cause it’s not a new Tom Petty album — it was recorded 25 years ago — and he didn’t want to release it as an old catalog album because he thought it deserved more than being a catalog album. He felt like it was too good to just put out and was sort of looking for the right story where it would have the exposure that it deserved. And he never came up with it.”
About two and a half years ago, Petty went to Rubin’s house and played the unreleased tracks, which he had since made a few changes to, for Rubin, and the quality “floored” him. “I had, like, a vague memory of them,” he said, “but some of them just hit me like, ‘Wow, what a great song! How did we ever miss this?'”
But during that listening session, Petty opened up about how he knew they had channeled something magical on those tapes, and could never get it back.
“He told me Wildflowers scares him, because he’s not really sure why it’s as good as it is,” Rubin said. “So it has this, like, haunted feeling for him. … He loves it, but it’s not like he can turn that on again. He couldn’t make Wildflowers 2 today. That was the point. The point was, ‘I can’t do this now. This was then, and it was where I was then and it was a prolific period. This is an extension of that moment.'”
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The Fat Angel Sings 