One of his best, and personally meaningful to a lot of people in the '90s.
Hear hear!
Context is everything.
If you came to Wildflowers well after its 1994 release you may have a different attachment point to it.
When it was released in 1994, there was no streaming services, P2P services were still pretty nascent and Napster was still 5 years away.
Radio still was a huge driver in what most people sought out at the record store.
Wildflowers came out the same year as Definitely Maybe, Dookie, The Blue Album, The Black Album, Parklife, Superunknown, The Downward Spiral, Illmatic, Ill Communication, Selected Ambient Works, and Vitology. (**holy shit 1994 was a killer year for music).
Ice-T's Thrash Band, Body Count, was releasing a
second album that was getting some mainstream radio play and bands like The Meat Puppets, Dino Jr., The Reverend Horton Heat, Marilyn Manson and The Jesus Lizard were not "underground" and becoming something you would hear on a mainstream rock station (as opposed to a College Rock format).
Petty's prior releases, even Full Moon Fever (because Nirvana and NIN and the Alt-Rock onslaught was just getting going), were very much tied to a sound that was, for the most part , firmly rooted in what was a popular sound, but with the Petty Magic.
But when Petty dropped Wildflowers, it stood out as something very different and apart from what was happening.
Songs like You Don't Know how it feels made Alt-radio because of the "roll another joint" lyrics (and because it fucking rules) - but it was really a throwback and stood out as apart from what you'd otherwise hear.
It was kind of a Petty-Blues & Ballad thing in a sea of "Basket Cases" and songs about Iron Lungs and Unraveling Sweaters.
These days there's Fleet Foxes, The Decembrists, Bright Eyes, Bon Iver's Emma and everything all the way to Talyor going "into the woods".
So if you come to Wildflowers with that experience surrounding it, it may not have the same impact.
I can't un-contextualize hearing Wildflowers for the first time from a landscape of experience that was 1994.
So, I stan for Wildflowers in a way I dont for almost anything.
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