Wildflowers
It’s a blessing. Three minutes of someone telling you it’s okay to leave, and Tom Petty put it first, before anything else on the record.
“Wildflowers” opens the album of the same name. There’s no narrative in it, no character, no study of anybody. You belong among the wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea. You belong wherever you feel free. It’s just permission, the kind most of us spend our whole lives waiting to receive, and it arrives in the plainest words a man could pick.
The production matches the words. Acoustic guitar, gentle drums, his voice intimate and close. Rick Rubin made the record during his run of returning rock legends to their essentials, stripping the layers away to find what was underneath. With Petty, what was underneath was kindness.
“You belong somewhere you feel free.”
That line meant one thing for a long time. It was about liberation, about getting out of whatever box you’d let yourself be put in.
Then Petty died, and the line stopped sounding like advice. Now it sounds like goodbye, like he’s saying it from somewhere we can’t follow.
I play this song when I need to remember that staying isn’t always noble. That leaving isn’t always cowardice. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit you’re in the wrong garden.
Wildflowers don’t grow in neat rows. They grow where they land. They bloom without permission.
He wrote the blessing and he hid it at the start, and then he went somewhere we feel free.
