Tom Petty’s official Twitch channel is hosting a screening party today, November 7, for the 2021 documentary Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers, which will feature a discussion moderated by the film’s director, Mary Wharton.
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The screening will take place at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.
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To promote the event, a clip from the doc has been posted on Petty’s Instagram page that features the late singer/songwriter’s longtime guitar tech Alan “Bugs” Weidel looking at a chart that showed the status of the various songs Petty was recording during the sessions for his 1994 solo album Wildflowers.
“Starting with whether the track was done or not, if there are words, if there are any edits to be made, all the different instruments that need to be on there, and when it was ready to mix, they would check it off here,” Weidel explains, then points out, “And the final was the George Drakoulias ‘fuck that shit up’ column.”
Drakoulias, the producer and A&R man who helped supervise the Wildflowers sessions, then appears and notes about the column, “Which meant, like … something stupid … who knows? It could’ve been anything. Some kind of crazy sound or something weird or something stupid to do.”
Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers features rarely-seen footage of Petty and members of the Heartbreakers working on Wildflowers, along with new interviews with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, producer Rick Rubin, among others.
The documentary, which originally debuted on YouTube, recently began streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Petty initially had intended for Wildflowers to be a double album, but eventually honored his label’s wishes and released it as a single-disc collection. Wildflowers peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and yielded one Top 20 single, “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” It also featured such gems as “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good to Be King.”
In 2020, an expanded collection titled Wildflowers & All the Rest was released that included unreleased songs from the Wildflowers sessions as well as demos, live tracks, and more.
Meanwhile, a couple of holiday-themed Petty gifts recently were made available at his official store—a silver Christmas tree ornament with an image of him wearing a top hat and a mug with his photo in front of a Christmas tree and the phrase, “It’s Christmas All Over Again,” which is a line from the chorus of a 1992 Petty and the Heartbreakers holiday tune.
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