The process of creating the defining album that the
Singer deemed his finest is explored in a dense new documentary
The album Tom Petty considered to be the best work of his career chronicled the most tumultuous period of his life. Between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 94, the stretch in which he recorded his classic album Wildflowers, Petty’s 22-year marriage to the mother of his two children fell apart, he fired the drummer with whom he had worked since his Heartbreakers band began nearly three decades before, and he left both the record company for which he recorded all of his hits and the producer who shaped some of his biggest ones. “He was blowing up every aspect of his life,” said Mary Wharton, who directed a new documentary set in that dense era, titled Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. “From his personal life to his business life to his creative life, Tom was trying to figure out how to put things back together in a way that made sense to him in that moment.”
Despite the frustration, controversy and agony of the time, Wildflowers also represented a fount of opportunity, a blank check for the future. For the most part, the film focuses on that aspect, leaving some of the more troubling issues either implicit, glossed-over or denied. Small wonder the film is as interesting for what it doesn’t include as what it does. Some of that has to do with what Petty revealed, and didn’t reveal, about his life at the time; some probably came as a result of a life that ended too soon and without warning. On 2 October 2017, Petty died at the age of 66 from what was ruled an accidental overdose of opioids, sedatives and an anti-depressant. An official statement by the family at the time stated that the musician had been taking that mix of medications to numb the escalating pain of emphysema, issues with his knees and a badly fractured hip.