Unreleased Tom Petty Demo Streaming Online

Bruce Henne | 06-27-2020

(hennemusic) Tom Petty's family are sharing the late rocker's original 8-track home recording demo of his 1994 hit, "You Don't Know How It Feels." The early version of the lead single from Petty's second solo record, "Wildflowers", is accompanied by a new, animated lyric video created and directed by Ben "Blaze" Brooks and Aaron Hymes.

The demo features slightly different lyrics than the final album version and introduces a line from another track, "Crawling Back To You", giving fans some insight into Petty's songwriting process as he plays all of the instruments on the recording.

"You Don't Know How It Feels" was a Top 15 US hit for Petty; a companion music video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video in 1995, while the album reached No. 8 on the US Billboard 200 on its way to sales of more than 3 million copies in the country.

After Petty originally wrote and recorded "Wildflowers" as a double album, his record label convinced him to trim it back to a single record; fans will get to hear that material when the demo will be included as part of a forthcoming reissue project due later this year, according to Rolling Stone.

"The family and the band are in a joyful process of discovering the Wildflowers sessions and demos and wanted to share a tiny bit of that with the fans today," says Adria Petty on behalf of the Petty Family. "The family and all our engineers and the Heartbreakers have been circling around this project and making it as delightful and completist as possible.

"We're really pleased to be able to share the second half of the Wildflowers double album. But there are also completist versions of how the sessions evolved. My dad was prolific at that time and there was so much recording done. Coming off the 'Last Dance with Mary Jane' session, it was a compete evolution of how dad recorded and how he made space for his own feelings. Wildflowers was very personal for him. He wasn't hiding behind anything."

Petty passed away in October of 2017 at the age of 66 in a Santa Monica, CA hospital after being found unconscious and in cardiac arrest at his Malibu home. Listen to the demo here.

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