The beloved Tom Petty may be in the thick of a tour with his formative band Mudcrutch, but that hasn’t stopped him from eyeing the future. Come 2017, fans may get a chance to see Petty perform his seminal 1995 album Wildflowers in its entirety.
I want to take the Heartbreakers and whoever else I need to reproduce every sound in a big way,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “That album was really about sound in a big way. I would like to go out there and perform the entire album as it was originally conceived with all of the songs.”
The album, which features hits like You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good To Be King,” is due for an extensive re-release. As Petty explains it, “I think I put four of the [Wildflowers outtakes] on the She’s The One soundtrack just to fill out the album,” says Tom Petty. “But they were very hastily mixed. Take ‘Climb That Hill.’ There’s a version of that on She’s The One, but the Wildflowers one I think is extremely better. I’m gonna put that out. ‘Hung Up And Overdue’ is another one we remixed and it turned into an epic. I had Carl Wilson [of the Beach Boys] and [Heartbreakers bassist] Howie Epstein singing quite a bit of harmony that didn’t come through on the original. Then again, there’s probably six songs that nobody has heard. There’s 11 or 12 [new] songs on the album. I think people are going to like it a lot. I like it a lot.”
The trick would be bringing a host of songs both old and new to the live setting. Petty has previously said that he wasn’t quite interested in doing full album shows, but recently saw The Rolling Stones’ perform a full interpretation of Sticky Fingers and thought they had something to say with it. “Single album concerts often don’t scan right for a concert,” he says. “But with the amount of material I have for the Wildflowers double album, I think I’ve got enough tempos and types of songs that I could do a live show … And it’ll be fun for the audience since there’s a bunch of songs they’ll know.”
Right now the plans are far from concrete, but we can still keep our fingers crossed!