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Tom Petty’s 1994 album “Wildflowers,” the subject of the SXSW documentary “Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free,” was in some ways one of the veteran rocker’s most casual albums. Made with producer Rick Rubin after a pair of bigger-sounding, more meticulously arranged albums with Jeff Lynne, “Wildflowers” has a low-key, ramshackle air to it, with its rough-hewn rocker songs tossed together with loose shuffles and acoustic ballads that actually have more going on than you realize.

There’s an intimacy and a melancholy to it, as befits a group of songs written by a guy whose state in life was summed up in the couplet that opened “To Find a Friend”: “In the middle of his life/He left his wife.”

“Wildflowers” was a subtle album whose impact slowly grew over time; nothing about it insisted that it should be taken as a big statement. But a recent boxed set,...

During the last week of his life, Tom Petty grew unusually wistful. Home after a tour with the Heartbreakers, he had his wife, Dana, call up his rarely seen 2002 “Fun in the Desert” video, in which he tooled around a barren landscape on a mini-motorcycle, then asked her to track down a high school girlfriend on social media. “He hated Facebook,” Dana Petty recalls. “But he got super-nostalgic. Looking back, it’s very strange.”

Little from his musical past tugged at him more than Wildflowers, the 1994 solo album that contained some of his most intimate,...

John Prine, a revered, Grammy-winning folk-Americana singer-songwriter whose career spanned nearly a half-century, died today of complications from coronavirus. He was 73.

Prine — A member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame who last year was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the first time — had been hospitalized since March 26 with Covid-19 symptoms and been listed in critical condition for more than a week. Earlier his wife, Fiona, had announced that she also had coronavirus symptoms.

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A former mail carrier, Prine was discovered by Kris Kristofferson, who produced the singer’s folk-tinged self-titled debut album for Atlantic Records in 1971. The acclaimed record...

The upcoming Tom Petty box set An American Treasure is an exploration of the singer’s catalog that skips past obvious hits in favor of lesser-known album tracks, alternate versions of familiar songs, great live moments, demos and even previously unreleased tunes. That’s the case with “Gainesville,” a song recorded during the Echo sessions in 1998 but never wound up on the album.

“Echo is supposedly his dark album,” says An American Treasure producer Ryan Ulyate. “But ‘Gainesville’ is this guy looking back on this early life. It is very...

The new Tom Petty box set An American Treasure won’t hit stores until September 28th, but his team is already thinking about future archival releases. Nothing is definite at the moment, but Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell tells Rolling Stone that the group hopes to release a live set commemorating their 1997 residency at the Fillmore in San Francisco. They played 20 sold-out shows at the historic theater in January and February of that year, radically changing the setlist each night. In 2009, seven songs from the Fillmore run were released on the Live Anthology compilation,...

It’s about an hour before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre for what may be the last time. Backstage, Petty is in his dressing room putting on a frontier rebel’s headdress to fight the chill. Keyboardist Benmont Tench is tweeting about the sad state of our country under Donald Trump. Bassist Ron Blair has battled stage fright for years since rejoining the Heartbreakers in 2002, after a 20-year sanity break. He wanders into Petty and cops to something you’re not likely to admit...

Rocker Tom Petty wrote new song "Running Man's Bible" during a flood of emotions about former bandmate Howie Epstein's death. The Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers leader has often struggled with Epstein's 2003 drug-related death, admitting the bass player's narcotics use had turned him into an unpredictable band mate - but he was still devastated after hearing of his passing.

In a past interview, Petty said, "He was just degenerating on us to the point where we thought keeping Howie in the band was actually doing him more harm than getting rid of him. His personal problems were vast and serious." He adds, "We tried everything we could to reach him but it got to the point where his ability to do gigs was diminishing. Eventually, we realized that we were just contributing to the problem. When you're living a life where you really don't have any responsibilities, it's easy for evil forces to take over.