It consists primarily of Petty singing and strumming the accompanying guitar part, while a number of other unassuming bass, harpsichord, piano, harmonium and percussion elements emphasise the chord changes at various points.īuilding the instrumentation around a repeating chord sequence is a great tactic for keeping things interesting and elevating the simple three-chord folk song to something majestic and moreish enough to play on repeat.The late Tom Petty was a great singles artist – tracks like ‘The Waiting’, ‘Refugee’, and ‘Free Fallin” sound terrific blasting from cars and on classic rock radio. Musically, Wildflowers is simple, but supremely executed. The album’s title track is a singer-songwriter style acoustic ditty that evokes the jingle-jangle of the 1960s Californian folk scene and the Californian landscape itself. Petty himself regarded it as his finest work. It was his second 'solo' record, although it featured every member of The Heartbreakers bar Stanley Lynch, and was the first record he made with legendary producer, Rick Rubin.

Runnin Down A Dream from Full Moon Fever (1989)ġ994’s Wildflowers was the fastest selling album of Petty’s career, achieving triple platinum status just nine months after its release in 1994. His use of a twelve-string guitar gives the whole thing a shimmer, shine and that delicious, slightly phasey sonic quality that is absolutely characteristic of Tom Petty around this time in his career. This creates a flowing, natural cadence that also invites cyclical repetition of the progression. On The Waiting, he also adds flavour to his delivery by using a right-hand technique that sits somewhere between strumming and arpeggiating the individual notes of the chords. Suspended chords help give that airy, not quite resolved feel that helps perpetuate the infinite loopability of many of Petty’s progressions. When he played his mega hit, Free Fallin, for example, he relied heavily on the Asus2 chord shape, but bumped it up a semitone with a capo at the first fret. The use of suspended chords is also characteristic of Petty’s playing. The simple chords in the intro’s progression of G, G/F#, Asus4 and D all share the common thread of having the third finger firmly planted on the third fret of the B string to create a high D note that chimes throughout. The Waiting is a prime example of great, functional Tom Petty chord craft.

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