Tom Petty - Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) (2LP)

Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) is the sort of release that makes you lean in. Released on 16 April 2021, it pulls back the curtain on Tom Petty’s most storied era, offering a companion set of studio run-throughs and reshaped takes from the Wildflowers sessions. Petty always wanted Wildflowers to be a double album, and this collection shows why that period has gripped fans for decades. You can hear the room, the conversation between players, and the push and pull of ideas being tested in real time.

These recordings were drawn from the original sessions produced by Petty with Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell, then mixed and curated by longtime engineer Ryan Ulyate from the archives for the Wildflowers & All The Rest project in 2020. Issuing them as a standalone the following year was a gift for anyone who missed the Super Deluxe box. The core band is right there: Campbell’s tone and taste on guitar, Benmont Tench’s piano and organ that always seem to answer Petty’s lines like an old friend, Steve Ferrone’s newly minted groove giving the songs clean, unhurried lift, and Howie Epstein’s melodic bass and harmonies. It’s the Heartbreakers in everything but name, caught at a moment when Petty was shedding gloss for feel.

What’s striking is how many of these performances make you re-hear songs you thought you knew. It’s Good to Be King, stripped of Michael Kamen’s later string swells, leans on the band’s pocket and Petty’s resigned drawl. You realise the grandeur was there already, inside the chord changes and the way Ferrone lets the snare bloom. Only a Broken Heart feels even more fragile in this guise, the vocal almost conversational, Tench’s keys hanging like breath in cold air. And You Don’t Know How It Feels, the hit that won Petty a Grammy in 1995, arrives a touch rawer and more ambling, as if it’s turning the corner with you rather than striding down main street. The bones are the same, but the mood shifts from swagger to late-night shrug.

A Higher Place has extra jangle and a lighter step, Campbell’s chiming guitars chasing the melody with the sort of clarity that made so many of us chase Tom Petty vinyl in the first place. Honey Bee stomps and grins, still swampy, but with fewer adornments, which only makes the riff feel stickier. Crawling Back to You is a quiet highlight here. The vocal sits closer to the mic, the lyric’s lonely logic even more exposed. Wake Up Time, with its piano front and centre, feels like the sun coming up across an empty street. If you’ve lived with the album for years, these takes are less about novelty and more about perspective. They remind you how much of Petty’s greatness was about choices in the room.

Ulyate’s mixes keep things honest and warm. Guitars sit wide. You can pick out Ferrone’s kick and the air around the cymbals. It’s not a polish job, more a respectful framing of how this band sounded as they found the sweet spot. On Finding Wildflowers vinyl, that space is even more tangible. The quiet passages breathe, Tench’s organ blooms, and the low end stays supple without turning muddy. If you collect Tom Petty albums on vinyl, this one earns its place next to Wildflowers & All The Rest and the original 1994 LP.

Critical reaction to the broader Wildflowers archival project was rightly enthusiastic, with major outlets praising the depth and care of the restoration. This set distils one of the most revealing discs from that campaign and gives it its own spine on the shelf. For newer listeners, it stands as an easy entry into the Wildflowers era. For lifers, it’s a conversation with the record you love, the kind you can return to and keep hearing new corners.

If you’ve ever flipped through crates in a Melbourne record store and felt that tug to take a chance on a familiar name, this scratches that itch. It’s a rewarding listen front to back, but it’s also the sort of album you can drop the needle on for a single side and feel like you’ve visited old friends. If you’re looking to buy Tom Petty records online, this is a smart pick, and it sits nicely alongside other Tom Petty vinyl in any collection. However you come to it, Finding Wildflowers is less an appendix and more a secret window into the house. It shows how the songs stood tall before the varnish, and it lets you hear a great band building the scaffolding for a classic. For fans of vinyl records Australia wide, that’s exactly the kind of story worth owning.