Promised for years prior to Tom Petty's untimely death in 2017, Wildflowers & All the Rest expands the rocker's beloved 1994 album Wildflowers into a comprehensive box, one filled with outtakes, demos, home recordings, and live performances. Petty originally delivered Wildflowers as a double-CD set to Warner Bros., but the label convinced him that it'd be easier to market a single disc, albeit one that ran the length of a double LP. Despite his acquiescence, the original uncut Wildflowers nagged at Petty, so he started to ...
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Promised for years prior to Tom Petty's untimely death in 2017, Wildflowers & All the Rest expands the rocker's beloved 1994 album Wildflowers into a comprehensive box, one filled with outtakes, demos, home recordings, and live performances. Petty originally delivered Wildflowers as a double-CD set to Warner Bros., but the label convinced him that it'd be easier to market a single disc, albeit one that ran the length of a double LP. Despite his acquiescence, the original uncut Wildflowers nagged at Petty, so he started to assemble a deluxe edition in the 2010s. It sadly didn't come to fruition until after his death, but Wildflowers & All the Rest does explain why the project stayed on his mind: there really was a wealth of good material left in the vault. A handful of these songs snuck out on the 1996 soundtrack to Edward Burns' romantic comedy She's the One ("California," "Hope You Never," "Hung Up and Overdue, "Climb That Hill," which is also present here as a solo acoustic blues), while Petty gave "Leave Virginia Alone" to Rod Stewart, so about half of the material is known to hardcore fans yet context means a lot here. Hearing these five songs with five excavated tracks alongside the original album confirms this was a purple patch for Petty, one where he was writing strong material executed with vigor by most of the Heartbreakers under the eye of Rick Rubin. With the notable exception of "Somewhere Under Heaven," where trebly guitars race each other up the mountain, most of the unheard material here skews toward the slower, softer side, underscoring the homespun illusion of the proper album. While the released album benefits from its savvy sequencing, where rockers provide a bit of a lift on each side, everything on this supplementary disc is cut from the same cloth as Wildflowers; it accentuates the original album, it doesn't detract from it. Outside of the companion disc, Wildflowers & All the Rest delivers a collection of sturdy, direct home recordings and a robust live disc that collects concert performances of the songs scattered throughout the years. A super deluxe set running five CDs and nine LPs contains another disc of alternate versions; here, there's an alternate version of "Girl on LSD," but the original B-side version of the song is oddly nowhere to be found on the box. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi
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