![]() Petty was on fire during this period, as the presence of 32 distinct compositions in the big box attests. It’s one of the ones you’d load under your arm in a fire. With fascinating oral-history annotation for all 70 tracks in the “super-deluxe” edition, the augmented “Wildflowers” is the best and most justified boxed set of this kind since the Beatles’ White Album compendium. That previously unheard 10-song studio set is the foundation of a series of new “Wildflowers” collections that range from two to five CDs (or five to nine LPs) - additionally augmented by compendiums of his fully produced home demos, experimental full- band studio takes and concert performances of this material. Petty was as smart as he looked, so rather than resequence the original, in the years before his death he came up with a disc of 10 outtakes, called “All the Rest,” that would have its own running order and implied storyline. Wouldn’t re-additions a quarter-century later risk seeming like getting into the weeds? But “Wildflowers” seemed pretty perfect as it was. In those cases, though, the dream was that imperfect albums might become masterpieces, unexpurgated. In that way, it’s attracted the kind of eternal fan speculation that’s surrounded other albums once intended to be doubles, like Paul McCartney’s “Red Rose Speedway” or ELO’s “Secret Messages,” both of which were finally released in two-LP expansions in the last couple years. Petty had planned “Wildflowers” as a double album but was talked into trimming it down to a mere 15-song mini-epic. The mythology goes deeper than just the album’s qualities it’s a matter of quantity too.
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