Tom Petty’s ‘Wildflowers’ Collaborator Rick Rubin Remembers His ‘Workman-Like Rigor’

Legendary producer Rick Rubin found himself working with Tom Petty multiple times over the years, but he was left most in awe when working with Petty on his 1994 album Wildflowers. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Rubin called Petty “a consummate craftsman” with a “workman-like rigor in the studio,” and reminisced about how quickly (and seemingly miraculously) Petty wrote amazing music:

“I remember when Tom lived in Encino and I would go to his house to listen to demos he was working on. One day, between cassette recordings of songs he was working on, he began strumming the guitar. After a couple of minutes of strumming chords, he played me an intricate new song complete with lyrics and story. I asked him what it was about. He said he didn’t know it just came out. He had written it or more like channeled it in that very moment. He didn’t know what it was about or what the inspiration was. It arrived fully formed. It was breathtaking.”

Rubin also said that he was talking about Wildflowers with Petty not long ago, and he said that the album scared Petty because it set an impossible standard for the rocker:

“He said, ‘I’m afraid of that album.’ I thought it was a strange comment. I asked what he meant. He said it’s daunting for him to think about it because it’s insurmountable. He didn’t think he could do it again, so it reserved a haunted place in his psyche.”

Petty and Rubin also worked together on Johnny Cash’s 1996 album American II: Unchained, so check out a brief clip of the two talking about that experience, from the documentary Running Down a Dream, below.

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