Tom Petty Shares His Favorite Tom Petty Album

You can’t erase Tom Petty’s incredible contributions to music. As a solo artist and a band member, he created well-known hits that went down in history. But among all his efforts, which did he thought of as his favorite?

Living the life of Tom Petty wasn’t easy. He had to go through a lot of issues in his life, personally and career-wise. The latter was well-documented, and prompted Petty to fight for his rights as an artist. His legal battles against his record label MCA urged him to voice out his opinions for artistic freedom and creative control, thus he became one of the well-known advocates for these.

Although Petty’s talents were magnificent and amazing in its own way, there were moments in his life that weren’t exactly worthy to be praised for. Back in the 80s, when synthesizers and sound machines flooded the world of music, Petty and his band, the Heartbreakers gave in to the pressure and decided to incorporate them to their music. This didn’t bode well, since the band were struggling to keep pace; it led the people to believe that they were lost and still finding their own pace.

But everything changed as the 90s approached. And in the middle of that decade, 1994 exactly, he created the seminal masterpiece, Wildflowers. It was the musician’s 2^nd solo work, but all of the Heartbreakers were present during the recording. This was done so that Petty could reap at the benefits of his creative control that he frequently advocated. With heartland rock that he long abandoned at the start of his career and have finally reemerged, Wildflowers, was his favorite.

In an interview with The Independent, Heartbreakers Keyboardist Benmont Tench told them: “Even on the last tour, if we played a song from Wildflowers, he’d [Petty] say: ‘That’s the best record we ever made.’ And I appreciated that he said ‘we’.”