Tom Petty - Wildflowers & All The Rest (7LP)

Wildflowers always felt like Tom Petty at his most open, but in October 2020 the vault finally gave up the rest of the story. Wildflowers & All The Rest restores the double album he wanted back in the mid‑90s, and the set lands with the weight of a long, deep exhale. Spin the opening title track and you hear that gentle, almost conversational guitar figure, the kind that sounds like a friend cleaning out a room and talking through the memories as he goes. Then the punch arrives. You Wreck Me, Honey Bee, It’s Good to Be King, Crawling Back to You. These songs were never exactly hidden, but they feel renewed here, seated next to the material that belonged with them all along.

Part of why this music still hits is the way it was made. Petty linked up with Rick Rubin and aimed for feel first, tape rolling at Sound City and other Los Angeles rooms with a small circle of killers. Steve Ferrone had just come into the fold, his pocket so steady it almost hums, and he anchors You Don’t Know How It Feels and You Wreck Me like a human metronome with soul. Mike Campbell’s guitar is a second voice throughout, patient and exact, and Benmont Tench colors everything with those elegant organ and piano touches. Ringo Starr drops in on To Find a Friend and you can hear that round, loping backbeat that only he has. Michael Kamen’s strings on It’s Good to Be King lift the coda into cinema, then he returns to wrap Wake Up Time in a late‑night glow. If you are the type who checks deadwax and credits while the side plays, this is catnip.

All The Rest is the real prize for fans, and it is more than a grab bag. Leave Virginia Alone had a life with Rod Stewart in the 90s, but here it sits in Petty’s intended context, a sigh of a tune that flicks a lighter toward a fragile goodbye. Confusion Wheel is weary and clear-eyed, a quiet cousin to Crawling Back to You. Harry Green, a tender remembrance of a childhood friend, lands like a Polaroid that went missing in a move and finally turned up. Somewhere Under Heaven surfaced years ago as a standalone, and it still glows with that ribbon of hope Petty could thread through melancholy. Hung Up and Overdue eases the curtain down with a soft wave. Hearing these ten tracks flow with the original sequence does not just fill gaps, it deepens the whole thing.

Go deeper and the Deluxe editions make the case that Wildflowers was a season, not just a record. The home recordings capture Petty sitting close to a mic, chasing the shape of a song before the band lights it up. Wildflowers in its home version is a whisper, and There Goes Angela (Dream Away) feels like a letter he never quite mailed. The live cuts trace the arc from the 1995 tour through later years, where You Don’t Know How It Feels became a crowd’s collective mantra and Time to Move On gained bittersweet strength. The companion documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, built from 16mm footage of these sessions, won the Grammy for Best Music Film in 2022, which fits. This era was filmed, recorded, and remembered with unusual care.

On vinyl, this set breathes. The standard Wildflowers & All The Rest vinyl stretches across three LPs, so the acoustic moments have air around them and the rockers never feel pinched. You can nudge the volume on It’s Good to Be King and let that string swell hit without the top end folding. Packaging is thoughtful, with session photos and liner notes that frame the story without getting in the way. If you are hunting Tom Petty vinyl, this is a crown jewel, and it is the version that will make friends ask what changed even if they have owned the 1994 album for years.

Wildflowers has always been a road record for life changes. Divorce and reinvention sit in the corners, yet the writing never wallows. Petty kept it plain, and that plainness lets the details glow brighter. That is why collectors who buy Tom Petty records online and folks flipping through a Melbourne record store bin end up walking out with this. It sounds like someone figuring it out right in front of you, with a band that knows when to push and when to leave space. If you are building a stack of Tom Petty albums on vinyl, start here, then keep going. And if you are on the fence about Wildflowers & All The Rest vinyl, consider this an invitation to drop the needle and let the room shift. For fans in any corner of the map, from local shops to vinyl records Australia, this set feels like coming home to a place you somehow have not fully seen until now.