TOM PETTY Wildflowers & All The Rest WARNERS

“Let me get to the point/Let’s roll another joint”

WILDFLOWERS was not the first Tom Petty album to have had its initial ambitions thwarted somewhat between conception and release. A decade or so earlier, Petty had set about Southern Accents, intended as a double-album state of the nation address surveying the Deep South, commemorating its music and contemplating its contradictions. The finished product was certainly far from bad, but it was nevertheless also a stretch from where Petty had once envisioned it taking him, and his listeners.

, similarly, was originally sketched as a 25-song double album, before being trimmed, at the suggestion of a nervous record label, to a nevertheless generous 15. The entry-level version of this reissue is that aborted 25-track double,plus contemporary studio outtakes, home demos, alternative studio cuts and live recordings, some of them previously unreleased.