Tom Petty - Wildflowers

This album is beautiful and extremely sad when heard in the context of Petty processing a collapsing relationship, a fact that I think only became apparent after the fact. Songs like “Wildflowers,” “It’s Good To Be King,” “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and “Time to Move On” reflect that sad resigned feeling of a breakup so poignantly I found myself texting my wife to tell her how much I appreciate her (I do that anyway!). Petty’s songwriting is miserable but almost peaceful, like a weight of stress has been lifted, leaving scars and regret and loneliness in its place, and there’s nothing left to do but get to work healing.

Petty seems as down in the dumps on this album as the rest of the 90’s alt-rockers, but he’s got a subtlety none of them can match. He’s a master of writing only the absolutely necessary bones of whatever’s on his mind, like a painter who can flick their brush across the canvas and with a few precise strokes create a perfectly recognizable portrait. I think that takes a special kind of empathetic view of the world to achieve, to see what pieces of something are the most important and assemble them with nothing wasted.

From the roundup Jamwise #47 - Best Albums of 1994, pt. 2.