Home after a tour with the Heartbreakers, he had his wife, Dana, call up his rarely seen 2002 “Fun in the Desert” video, in which he tooled around a barren landscape on a mini-motorcycle, then asked her to track down a high school girlfriend on social media.

“He hated Facebook,” Dana Petty recalls.

“He would always say, ‘That’s the best record we ever made,’” says Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench.

Around 2012, in the midst of working on a new Heartbreakers album (Hypnotic Eye), Petty decided the time had come to finally release Wildflowers in its complete two-disc form.

“I know he really wanted it to be finished,” says Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.

His daughter Adria Petty (who curated the collection along with Dana Petty, Campbell, Tench, and Adria’s sister Annakim Violette) says the set “helps you understand the magic of how my dad did something” in a way nothing else can.

“I always thought they got together and maybe he had a certain amount of songs and presented them to Rick,” she says.

“Our world was turned upside down, and it did some damage,” says Dana.

Rubin and Petty would have seemed to be on different ends of the musical spectrum, but according to Adria, who was on the flight as well, they made an initial connection there, starting with the fact that both had attended the recent Bob Dylan 30th anniversary concert in New York.

“From that point on, I was excited about the possibility of working with Tom,” Rubin recalls.

When the work commenced, Rubin recalls that Petty only had one song, “It’s Good to Be King.” But it was clear to Campbell that the album would be a different one from the start.

“We were worried a little bit if we could trust Rick or not to do what we wanted to do and not take it in the wrong direction,” says Campbell.

Although Lynch was technically still in the Heartbreakers, Petty and Rubin began auditioning others for the album, eventually including British percussionist Steve Ferrone.

“Occasionally, there was a song we’d play and I’d say, ‘Okay, this sounds more like the Tom Petty I know,’” says Ferrone.

Home from college during a Thanksgiving break, Adria watched her father and Rubin work on string arrangements and “geek out” over the Beatles’ White Album.

(“Only a Broken Heart” feels particularly like an outtake from that Beatles masterpiece.) “He really had a fun time doing it,” Adria recalls.

“He wasn’t really open about what was going in inside his private world,” Tench says.

“The songs obviously show there was something going on, and the aftermath shows there was something going on… He’d come to the studio and have these remarkable songs.” Adds Adria, “I don’t think that there was any doubt about what the record was about.

Campbell insists that Petty wasn’t pressured: “It wasn’t shoved down our throats,” he says.

Even at 15 songs, the released version of Wildflowers was still long, nearly the equivalent of an old-fangled double LP, and still reflected the musical range Petty and Rubin aimed for.

“He was this strange combination of being musically conservative but wanting to move forward,” says Tench.

When he and engineer Ryan Ulyate began revisiting the shelved half two decades later, Petty realized he’d forgotten about songs like “Somewhere Under Heaven,” a psychedelic Wall of Sound creation.

I had no memory of this song.” (Ulyate recalls that moment as well: “He said, ‘Who is that guy?’ And I said, ‘I think it’s you.’”) “There were things I didn’t even recognize until halfway through,” recalls Campbell.

What happened to that song?’ It was like rediscovering new songs, in a way.”.

“I couldn’t believe it when we listened,” Rubin recalls.

They sounded just like Wildflowers, but none were on the album.” Petty seemed to be grappling with a way to release the material, and floated the idea to Rubin of releasing it as a standalone album called Wildflowers 2, although Rubin says he talked him out of it: “I said that might give people the impression it’s a new album in the Wildflowers style.”.

“Oh, God, he was so excited to do a tour behind it,” says Dana Petty. “He really wanted to make it something special.

He had such a great year and said, ‘I can put it all behind me and do Wildflowers and do whatever I want.’ He was really happy.” During rehearsals for his last tour, Petty would occasionally work on new harmonies and arrangements for the Wildflowers songs with Charley and Hattie Webb, the British sisters who sang backup at those shows.

After the Heartbreakers’ last show, at the Hollywood Bowl on September 25th, 2017, Petty hosted an intimate party at his and his wife’s room at their Bel Air hotel, where he talked with Ferrone about what he had in mind: playing the original Wildflowers start to finish, followed by the rest of the material, with guests like Stevie Nicks, Eddie Vedder, and Steve Winwood.

A week after the last Heartbreakers show, those dreams faded when Petty collapsed at his L.A.

“I did not want him to go,” Dana says of that last tour.

Accusing Dana of “gross mismanagement” of the estate, Adria and Annakim Violette, Petty’s daughters from his first marriage, sued her for $5 million, contending that she had excluded them from the estate’s finances.

In subsequent court filings, Dana called Adria “erratic” and “abusive,” and claimed she wanted to put her father’s name on products like salad dressing.

“They were going to just slap out All the Rest with the same cover from Wildflowers, like, ‘Here you go,’” she says.

From the sidelines, the Heartbreakers — Campbell, Ferrone, Tench, bassist Ron Blair, and multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston — could do little but watch the fight play out.

“It was sad that it was not harmonious at times,” says Campbell.

Tom would have been furious because he never let his personal life get into the press.” (Adria clarifies that the Heartbreakers were not her targets: “They are my family, like my uncles. There’s no disrespect for them.”).

“As soon as there weren’t attorneys involved and there weren’t people trying to manipulate the dialogue,” says Adria of the reconciliation, “it was completely smooth.”?

“I did search for a couple months for the original double-album sequencing,” says Adria.

But after searching “the home studio and all of our closets and cupboards,” says Dana, the estate and Ulyate were able to put together an entire disc of unreleased recordings of Petty at home, working his way through the Wildflowers songs, some with different lyrics or arrangements, and with Petty sometimes overdubbing instruments himself

In addition to unplugged versions of Wildflowers songs, the estate also discovered completely unknown tunes like the gentle, harmonica-laced “There Goes Angela (Dream Away).” “I was baffled,” Tench says

You get to hear what originally came out of him, versus what he shared with everyone.” Adria also learned that “Don’t Fade on Me,” seemingly a chronicle of his marriage on the original Wildflowers, began as the story of a band, not a relationship

Regarding the release of those and other private recordings, Campbell says he used a simple formula: “My approach was to just pretend I was Tom:  ‘This is good’ or ‘No, please, don’t let the world ever see that song!’ I had a pretty good sense of that

“It keeps me in the band — I really don’t like not being in the band,” says Tench

It makes me happy to hear it.” Dana Petty had a similar reaction as she listened to unearthed recordings of her late husband’s voice at a studio

“It’s awkward thinking about getting the Heartbreakers together without Tom there,” says Campbell, who joined Fleetwood Mac in 2018 and hopes to tour himself next year with his new band, the Dirty Knobs

“It was really embarrassing and a weird and horrible thing to go through after you lost your dad,” says Adria

Adria Petty, All the Rest, Boxed set, Dana Petty, Heartbreakers, Rick Rubin, Tom Petty, Wildflowers