In the early Nineties, nearly two decades into a Hall of Fame rock career with his band the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty needed to make a change. Frustrated by his record label and with his marriage dissolving, he tapped Rick Rubin for a solo project. 1994’s Wildflowers became his biggest album and redefined Petty’s career.
“Wildflowers built up in him over the course of those two decades since that first album in 1976,” acknowledges longtime Rolling Stone writer/editor and SXSW loyalist David Fricke, who wrote the liner notes for last year’s expansive box set Wildflowers & All the Rest. “In a sense, Wildflowers was the beginning and the end of something. He found his mojo again when he got back to that style of recording he initially had with the band back in the day.”
Mary Wharton’s new documentary, Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free, captures the seminal LP’s making. Leaning on new footage of Petty in the studio with Rubin, the film reveals both the songwriter’s workmanlike focus and his excitement in creating something new.
“As someone who’s spent a lot of time with that record over the past year, there was a lot in the film that I learned and enjoyed, just a sort of immersion in what was a very important crossroads for him,” says Fricke, who leads a festival discussion with Wharton, Petty’s daughter Adria, and her crew, about the making of the movie. “Most documentaries tend to take a long view. It’s someone’s life story or a big chunk of their life. This actually focuses on two or three years while this record was being born.”
That tight focus steeps Somewhere You Feel Free in a nostalgia more poignant since Petty’s 2017 death, but also boils with the uncertain energy of the artist re-creating himself and the viewer’s knowledge of the exceptional outcome.
“What do you do when you’re a star like that with a band, how do you change, how do you keep moving?” offers Fricke. “In going back to the album, you realize this was a really fertile period. This wasn’t a guy running out of options. Wildflowers sounds exactly like Petty, but it doesn’t sound like any other record he made. And that is a decisive breakthrough.”
Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free
Headliners
World Premiere
Available 6pm-midnight, Wed. March 17
SXSW panel: Wednesday, March 17, 8pm
This article appears in March 12 • 2021.
