Wildflowers & All The Rest

This is a fantastic box that will occupy fans for the next few weeks and months, but it’s also a superb gateway into the world of Tom Petty for those who like both pretty things and great music (and have a few bob to spare).

Wildflowers is very much a showcase for Petty as a solo artist. At that point in his life Petty was a songwriting machine and this reissue has the demos to prove it. ... He was still displaying extraordinary ambition and, most importantly, still speaking to and for his very large audience. ... Tom Petty had the miraculous ability to write songs almost anyone could identify with and enjoy. Wildflowers & All the Rest is the most revealing window we have into his process so far.

Suffused with warmth and memory, this set belongs among your Tom Petty records. [Nov 2020, p.97]

One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers and All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a few letters. ... The deep despair is there, too, in the rich soil of these songs. But what makes it bearable, and makes the record so timelessly listenable, is everything else that’s mixed in: humor, wisdom, a little randiness and a palpable sense of hope.

With fascinating oral-history annotation for all 70 tracks in the “super-deluxe” edition, the augmented “Wildflowers” is the best and most justified boxed set of this kind since the Beatles’ White Album compendium. It’s one of the ones you’d load under your arm in a fire. Petty was on fire during this period, as the presence of 32 distinct compositions in the big box attests.

Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part.

Thanks to all involved in this loving project, we get a better chance to explore and understand what made Wildflowers bloom as fragrant and beautiful as it did more than a quarter century ago and what made Petty the perfect talent to pluck those blooms from the studio weeds.

It’s hard to argue against Wildflowers as one of Tom Petty’s highest masterpieces, especially after listening to Wildflowers & All the Rest. It’s a gift from the musical gods that the extra material here has been unearthed to contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the album. All of it demands repeated listens to take in its beauty and brilliance.

It’s a sumptuous array to be sure, and one that further expands upon Petty’s lingering legacy.

There's a lot to take in, but Petty was at one of his many peaks and this is worth luxuriating in. [Nov 2020, p.92]

Its very existence provides valuable insight into the creative process. In the end, that’s the most enduring of all possible additions to Petty’s legacy.

The 10 tracks eventually sliced from Wildflowers don’t seem to have been culled for any coherent rhyme or reason: the virtues of the original album are abundant among the omitted tracks. ... Of the three further discs available for big spenders, the home demos and alternate versions are – as is usually the way of these things – mostly likely to be listened to once, out of curiosity. But there are charming moments among the demos.

From the start, it’s clear that this isn’t some posthumous dig around in a bucket of old offcuts in an attempt to bleed some money out of dedicated fans, but rather a slick and gratifying fulfilment of one of Petty’s long standing wishes. ‘Wildflowers & All The Rest’ feels less like grave-robbing and more like bringing back one of the all-time greats back to life.

In the years since Petty released his 1994 classic album, he slowly revealed, on-stage and in interviews, more about the darkly personal inspirations for the record, this retrospective box does the same for the sprawling, bursting creative process that went into making Wildflowers. It’s the definitive artistic statement that newly illuminates one of the most fruitful, inspired periods of the American legend’s career.