It’s good to meet girls/A sweet little queen/Who can’t run away.” Characteristically, his sarcasm stops short of judgmental sneering. On “It’s Good to Be King,” Petty assumes the identity of your basic self-obsessed male, singing, “It’s good … to have your own way….
For all its urgency, Wildflowers brims with flashes of the singer’s trademark deadpan wit, from the crisply rhythmic “You Don’t Know How It Feels” on which he asserts, “Let me get to the point/Let’s roll another joint/And turn the radio loud/I’m too alone to be proud” to the sly, snarling irony of “Honey Bee” and “Cabin Down Below,” two steady burners fueled by Petty and Campbell’s testosterone-drunk electric guitars (and by such lyrics as “I’m a man in a trance/I’m a boy in short pants/When I see my honeybee”).
and others would later use to revitalize contemporary music.Īlso at the fore is Petty’s sense of humor. Buoyant tracks like “A Higher Place” and “You Wreck Me” remind us that Petty and his band were the first to marry the chiming lyricism of the Byrds to a more raw, harder style of rock & roll, prefiguring the approach R.E.M. In Petty’s case the key virtues are grit and grace, and Rubin’s taut, muscular production emphasizes both these gifts. Tom Petty to Receive Posthumous PhD in Music From University of Florida But Wildflowers’ resolute passion and maturity grow more evident with each listen until the album acquires a haunting, enduring resonance.
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True, Wildflowers is not as sonically adventurous as Southern Accents (1985) or as instantly accessible as Full Moon Fever (1989), Petty’s two most impressive albums since the early peak he reached in 1979 with Damn the Torpedoes. On it the fortysomething rocker offers 15 songs that focus on the conflicting emotions of adulthood, from rueful nostalgia to cynical self-doubt to hope and yearning. Petty’s music, however, has always demanded a respect that no amount of wry humility could undermine, and his new album, Wildflowers, proves no exception. Neither a blue-collar poet like Bruce Springsteen nor an outspoken maverick like Neil Young, Petty is most familiar to us in the dryly goofy, self-effacing guises he adopts in his videos the Mad Hatter haplessly burping into the camera or the adoring oaf dragging around Kim Basinger’s corpse. Among his generation of heartland-rock heroes he’s conspicuous for not having cultivated a clear public persona.
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