A new lyric video and digital single for Tom Petty’s 1993 demo of “You Don’t Know How It Feels” has just been released as a teaser for the upcoming ‘Wildflowers: All The Rest’ collection due out later this year.
Here’s the tune as we came to know it and the newly discovered archive version is above.
“You Don’t Know How It Feels” was released in 1994 on Tom’s second solo album ‘Wildflowers’. The demo version was recorded in Petty’s home studio and features slightly different lyrics from the album version. “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,” Tom Petty’s daughter Adria said in a press release on behalf of her family.
Aida told Rolling Stone, “I thought, ‘What a weird song to pick as the single, of all those songs.’ They had an album of amazing songs. But there’s something about it that makes you feel at ease, like you belong. The idea of ‘you don’t know how it feels to be me’ – people can identify with that feeling; and ‘roll another joint’ is saying, ‘Tune out the noise for a second because there’s so much of it.’ And that felt appropriate now.”
She went on to say, “My dad’s demos were always really awesome. They were a good guiding light in the Wildflowers sessions. And this one has a right-out-of-the-box feeling to it. . . The family and all our engineers and the Heartbreakers have been circling around this project and making it as delightful and completist (sic) as possible. We’re really pleased to be able to share the second half of the Wildflowers double album.”
While ‘Wildflowers’ was a Tom Petty solo album, all members of The Heartbreakers appear somewhere on the record. Petty released it under his own name because he didn’t want to give any creative control to the other members in the studio. The direction was all Tom Petty and Rick Rubin.
