Tom Petty’s posthumous album sales have soared — no surprise there — but there’s an unlikely frontrunner when it comes to the late Heartbreakers frontman’s most sought-after album. Second-hand sale prices for vinyl copies of Tom Petty’s 1994 solo album, Wildflowers , have skyrocketed in the weeks following his death, according to Time’s Money magazine.
While Tom Petty’s album and digital song sales spiked over 6,700 percent within days after he died, it’s the price for Wildflowers that has music lovers emptying their wallets. According to Money , mint vinyl copies of Wildflowers , which is Petty’s second solo album, are garnering prices up to $1,300 on online sites like Amazon and eBay. Even imperfect copies of Petty’s second solo effort are fetching upwards of $600.
Wildflowers was nowhere near as popular as Tom Petty’s 1989 solo debut, Full Moon Fever , which featured multiple hit singles, including “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and “Free Fallin’” and was later certified five-times platinum. And because Wildflowers was released during the peak of the CD era, not as many vinyl copies of the album were pressed. With only one round of printing 23 years ago, the vinyl version of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers is estimated to only have about 5,000 copies in existence.
Wildflowers was released by Tom Petty in 1994 and was his first album as a newly signed Warner Bros. Records artist. While Wildflowers didn’t contain the megahits that Full Moon Fever did five years earlier, Petty diehards helped make the single “You Don’t Know How It feels” a Billboard hit.
Tom Petty seemed to have a soft spot for the title track to Wildflowers . Petty once said he “just took a deep breath” and the song “Wildflowers” came out of him.
“The whole song,” Tom said, according to the website Performing Songwriter .
“Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it…I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Shortly before his death, Tom Petty even teased a Wildflowers tour. Petty had planned to release a deluxe version of Wildflowers with a full bonus disc of unreleased material, which he had hoped to play on a special tour. Tom had reportedly even recruited Norah Jones for the proposed Wildflowers tour.
“The Wildflowers tour will have to be in smaller places because it’s just a lot of quiet and a lot of it is acoustic,” Petty told Rolling Stone just months before his death.
Sadly, Tom’s final Wildflowers foray never happened. Fans may still get the reissue, but for now, vinyl collectors will have to fork out big bucks for an original copy of Tom Petty’s hard-to-find sophomore solo.
You can see the music video for Tom Petty’s Wildflowers single “You Don’t Know How it Feels” below.
[Featured Image by Theo Wargo/Getty Images]
