Wildflowers & All The Rest

One of the many things I have come to love about being a Tom Petty in recent years, it's the release of extensive box-sets with lots of unreleased material and live cuts. My personal favourite releases have been the extensive four disc collections, Live Anthology and the excellent An American Treasure. Now with the release of Wildflowers & All The Rest, it seems that favourites list has just got longer.For those that do not know, Wildflowers was released all the way back in 1994. Despite the fact that it features the majority of The Heartbreakers, the album is considered a Tom Petty solo album. The record was released through Warner Bros and features production from Rick "murderer of music" Rubin, Mike Campbell and Petty himself. The album was a quick success and spawned a number of hit singles. It was originally intended to be a twenty five track album but was cut down due to concerns with the album length. This re-release features all the intended tracks (the original fifteen track album and a ten track second disc), a selection of home recorded demos and a disc of live material.The original Wildflowers album is by far my favourite Tom Petty album. The album contains some great tunes like You Don't Know How It Feels, You Wreck Me and the album title track. It's made every bit sweeter by the excellent production and superb engineering. Even though the sound is all very clear and a little bit on the sterile side, the album has a raw feeling that benefits the music greatly. It also has quite a wide dynamic range, still sounding great all these years later. This new copy is no different. In fact, I reckon the first disc is simply a repressing of the original.The second disc is "All The Rest", the ten tracks that were cut before the album was originally released. Honestly, if this is the standard of the filler tracks, I think a double album would have went down very well. The music is technically more of the same but these are all very good songs. The sound throughout the disc is very consistent and fits with the original Wildflowers album very well. The production for a couple of tracks is a little different, not quite as sharp as the main album but by no means is this a gripe or an issue. It's a great sounding disc and could have been an actual album release as it is.The Home Recordings disc is a selection of demos etc, made up of raw recordings of Wildflower album tracks etc. This is a great disc and it's easily the most interesting thing here. Hearing these songs stripped down to their bare minimum is quite something. It really makes you appreciate just how good these songs were before they were built up in the studio. The following live disc is also a beauty. The recordings are all clear, sharp and have been very well produced. It sounds just as good as the Live Anthology release and makes for a great end to this four disc collection.The packaging for Wildflowers & All The Rest is the same kind of packaging as An American Treasure. I personally bought the deluxe CD release and it comes in a hardback mini book. Each CD is stored in its own thick cardboard sleeves and it is accompanied by a booklet full of cool notes etc. Everything looks great, it feels sturdy and there appears to be no issues here.It's a fantastic looking product and I hope that we see more of these deluxe collections in the future. If you're a fan, don't even doubt it. This is a must have and is an absolute steal for £35.

I first bought Wildflowers on cassette when it came out and later bought the CD. I have always rated it Petty's strongest 'mature period' album, with four of Petty's strongest ever tracks - Wildflowers, You Wreck Me, Crawling Back to You and It's Good to be King - supported by 11 other good to excellent tracks. This 4CD release includes, as CD2, the 10 further tracks Petty had considered including at the time on a double CD. These 10 tracks are again good to excellent: the four standouts being Leave Virginia Alone,. Confusion Wheel, California and Hung Up and Overdue. The CD2 tracks are generally more introspective and melancholic than parts of CD1, being written at a time Petty's first marriage was on the rocks. CD3 contains home recordings by Petty on guitar, piano and bass of 15 tracks (mainly tracks from CD1). Atypically for an archive release, these home recordings appear to be almost fully finished, though stripped down, versions of the originally released tracks. This goes to highlight Petty's song crafting skills and means that CD3 can be played repeatedly as an alternative unplugged version of the album, rather than a curio for infrequent listening. For example, Crawling Back To You is equally impressive in its fully produced (on CD1), unplugged (on CD3) and live (on CD4) versions. CD$, Wildflowers Live, extends to 74 minutes and its tracks have been carefully selected from various performances over a 20 year period from the early 1990s. The 11 minute version of It's Good to Be King is particularly impressive, with outstanding guitar and keyboards by Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, who curated the selections. CD4 also contains two obscure Petty songs, Drivin' Down to Georgia (a Heartbreakers jam) and Girl on LSD (a humorous track in the vein of Johnny Cash). The box set is accompanied by a leaflet with information on each song, including comments by Campbell, Tench and CD1 producer Rick Rubin. With four great CDs, this is an excellent addition to the Petty Catalogue,

In short, Wildflowers is Tom Petty’s finest work.....and now 28 years later, all the recordings made at the time have been made available.....as ‘All The Rest’....The story goes that TP wanted to release a double album but the record company declined leaving 10 recordings out from the originally released CD back in 1992....A few weeks ago on release day I purchased the 3 vinyl set and it sounds amazing, I then went about looking at the best way to get hold of the rest of the recordings and decided on this 4 CD deluxe edition which in addition to the album and the ‘All The Rest’ recordings, gives you Tom’s solo home recordings and live versions making this a 54 track set....it also comes with an excellent booklet providing detailed track by track commentary mainly from producer Rick Rubin, Heartbreakers band members Mike Campbell ,Steve Ferrone and Benmont Tench and engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate.....It is a fantastic product and I would hope that we get to more deluxe editions in the future....Even for those who are only aware of Tom through his greatest hits, this set is a steal at the price.....

Excellent quality sound

Love Tom Petty's work and it's been great to finally get the full Wildflowers package as Petty wanted it to be released. In addition to the studio albums we get a live cd and another of demos around the sessions. In addition we also get a little booklet. Overall good value for a nice package of some of Petty's best work. If you like Petty and the original Wildflowers, you'll love this.

happy

Bought as a gift so can’t comment

worth every penny for any fan of the late great tom petty, well packaged with different versions of songs and love the more basic home recordings, feel as though your sitting in same room as tom plays you the songs on his own, love it