Review Summary: The meditative peak of Tom Petty's career, "Wildflowers" finds an artist questioning life's essence and searching for the future road.
An album can sum up every aspect of a singer’s creation. "Wildflowers" represents Tom Petty and everything he chose to be—every breath of musicality and every note that decorated his musical approach. Although not everybody can say that "Wildflowers" is his favorite Tom Petty's record, listeners can feel that the album is the supreme expression of musical accomplishment, a summary of a truly wonderful career, and a gate through a range of emotions that was practically unique in American décor. Also, it balances sad songs and pretty ballads, love hymns and visions of the past, and, above all, it keeps intact what we all love about Tom Petty: those crystal-clear harmonies, those Beatles-esque passages, and the celebration of life and love that was his creation.
I cannot say that I straight-away fell in love with "Wildflowers." I was initially drawn in by the first three songs and the last two (if I recall correctly), but the middle of the album felt overly pessimistic and musically dull to me. As the years went by, I finally come to appreciate the entire record and give it the proper consideration. Once I grew attached to "Wildflowers" (both lyrically and musically), the other Tom Petty albums seemed unperfect in comparison because this one was the complete expression of his musical maturity. Tom Petty brilliantly refined his sound and released this album under the solo title (not as Heartbreakers), because everything was so nostalgic and personal that only could be the work of a single artistic entity, of a musician who could fully account for the quality of all the songs.
Furthermore, all the lyrics follow a more intimate direction. If "Wildflowers" is a vaporous love song, "Time To Move On" paints a rhetorical meditation: "It's time to move on, it's time to get going/ What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing/ But under my feet, baby, grass is growing/ It's time to move on, time to get going". He stands at crossroads (as Mr. Johnson once stood) and contemplates the wide-open road that lies ahead. In an L.A. drought atmosphere, Tom Petty questions his existence and his future and paints the dessert with musical splendor and sheer beauty. Even if the future remains unknown, he feels that he needs to depart from what was collective or unpersonal and desperately has to find his own direction. Such thoughts were unthinkable during The Heartbreakers' period. There the lyrics concerned girls, smoking cigarettes, and playing cool. Here stands a youthful maturity that has faced both hard and good times, and it has decided to take another step forward, toward the achievement of a true individual image.
Another element that makes "Wildflowers" highly distinctive is its ever-contrasting character. So, as upbeat songs such as "You Wreck Me Babe" contrast with retrospective and melancholic ballads like "It’s Good To Be A King," the climate changes all over the album’s course and culminates with the pessimism of "Hard On Me." After a suite of transitional songs, the album returns to its expressive rhythmic beauty with "A Higher Place". So, from "It’s Good To Be A King" to "Don’t Fade On Me," it loses the initial vitality, "A Higher Place", providing a coming to life. It's followed by the intimate "House In The Woods" and by the heart-pounding ballad "Crawling Back To You," which shows a more passionate alternative to the retrospective character of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ songs, both moments highlighting a conceptual density given by the evocative arrangements. With its nostalgic character, "Wake Up Time" paves the way for a new artistic direction and represents an ascension to musical power and conscience.
In the end, we are invited to "open up our eyes and shine." That's exactly how the album feels: beginning as a ballad and progressing through pessimistic metamorphoses, the conclusion is like a waking up to conscience, to the desertic beauty, to the sunny folk landscape that served as the essence of bitter-sweet songs like "Even The Losers."
So clear, so greatly produced, and, above all of the technical qualities, so personal, Tom Petty’s masterpiece "Wildflowers" shows us the existential depths of an artistic soul and introduces us to a distinct creative spirit that added a highly intimate dimension to The Byrds and Bob Dylan’s harmonies. A great American artist and an elegiac composer, Tom Petty searched for a direction and was about to find it in the end. Even if that direction wasn’t truly followed with the future releases, "Wildflowers" crackles open a window to the artistic infinite and feels like a walk through fields of gold.
