Tom Petty Releases Lost Song From ‘Wildflowers’ Era, Announces New Album
Tom Petty has just released "Somewhere Under Heaven," co-written with Mike Campbell for 1994's Wildflowers but left unheard until now. The track, available for purchase now through digital retailers, will be part of a new archival project titled Wildflowers: All the Rest.
Even a brief listen to "Somewhere Under Heaven" places it firmly in context with the original album's layered complexity. You can hear a sample of the new song above. The three-times platinum Wildflowers, a No. 8 hit that marked the first of three Petty albums co-produced by Rick Rubin, moved with deceptive grace from brawny rockers ("You Wreck Me," "Cabin Down Below," "Honey Bee") to acoustic fragility (the title track, "Time to Move On") to moving longform narratives ("It's Good to be King," "Crawling Back to You").
And apparently there was much more where that came from. The release of Wildflowers: All the Rest, which features songs written between 1992-94, apparently corrects a wrong that goes back more than two decades. Petty says Wildflowers was originally intended to be a double album.
"Somewhere Under Heaven" can also be heard during the closing credits for the new movie Entourage, which opens this week. Petty's most recent studio album, last summer's Hypnotic Eye, became his first-ever U.S. No. 1. It was also his highest-charting U.K. release since Wildflowers went Top 10 20 years ago..
See Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Other Rockers in the Top 100 Albums of the '90s
Criminally Underrated Rock Albums