Wildflowers

About

For an artist who built his career on a certain degree of stubbornne, <i>Wildflowers</i> wasn’t just an admission of vulnerability; it was like standing naked in front of an audience. By the mid-1990, after two decades of marriage, Petty was heading toward divorce—a personal cataclysm that would fuel much of 1999’s <i>Echo</i>. But you could hear the heartbreak coming on 1994’s <i>Wildflowers</i>, his second solo album, and one that features some of his most somber tunes: The title track finds him pining for a kind of beauty you can’t possess without ruining it, while the heartache in “To Find a Friend” is self-evident. “It’s good to be king/And have your own way,” Petty sings on “It’s Good to Be King.” Sure—but the subtext here is that it’s a kingdom of one. The magic, of course, is that despite the effort and attention that was put into the creation of <i>Wildflowers</i>, the album sounds natural and unforced—a sense of intuitiveness attributed, in part, to the influence of new producer Rick Rubin. Petty was writing from a quieter place now, and finding nuance in his solitude. And he was in a productive state of mind: Rubin said Petty once paused the tape between a demo playback and wrote an entirely new song, end to end, in a few minute. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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