Wildflowers & All The Rest

During Tom Petty's final interview with the Los Angeles Times, as the triumphant 40th anniversary tour with The Heartbreakers was coming to an end, he announced that his next big focus would be to finally revisit his 1994 masterpiece, Wildflowers, co-produced with Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell.

Wildflowers in many ways changed Tom's creative life - as a recording artist, collaborator and band leader - while a profound, personal crisis transformed the stories and emotional thrust in his songs. Tom ultimately wrote more songs than he could release at the time. In fact, Tom, Rubin and Campbell completed the album as a double CD with 25 songs, nearly two hours of music, but his label advised restraint. Released on November 1, 1994, Wildflowers - a single CD with 15 songs, still more than an hour in length - was Tom's most acutely confessional album to date.

The resurrection of Wildflowers has been a long time coming. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone Tom detailed his plans for the reissue, telling the magazine, "I broke through to something else. My personal life came crashing down, and it derailed me for a while. But I was at the top of my game during that record." Then again in 2016 on SiriusXM's Tom Petty Radio, he discussed his desire for a Wildflowers tour to coincide with a reissue. Tom had always intended to release the second half of the album, a collection he named All The Rest, featuring ten songs from the Wildflowers recording sessions that were left off the original version and five unreleased tracks (different versions of four other songs would appear on the soundtrack to the 1996 film, She's The One).

Tom's vision of the project is becoming a reality due to the commitment of his loving family, bandmates and collaborators who helped unearth many previously unheard gems. The compilation was curated by Tom's daughters, Adria and Annakim Petty, and was produced by Tom's long-time engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate.