Released on Nov. 1, 1994, Tom Petty’s Wildflowers asked bigger questions – and, within “It’s Good to Be King,” in some very surprising ways.
The single set up in a familiar fashion, as Petty recalled the grandiose plans of youth on the way to a deeply melancholy chorus (can I help it if I still dream from time to time?). His slow, self-conscious drawl was soon joined by an incisive guitar solo. It was all very much in keeping with Tom Petty’s core sound alongside the Heartbreakers – even if Wildflowers was credited as a solo effort.
But then everything is subsumed in a crescendo of swirling string-fueled emotion from conductor Michael Kamen – first of euphoria and then, finally, of a certain realism. Suddenly, “It’s Good to Be King” has revealed itself as a center point for the larger album.
We age, this song openly acknowledges, and our dreams change. Petty leads us to this sobering vista with an insistent piano signature, one with depths of meaning similarly never hinted at in the gutty simplicity of his early recordings.
Those songs had ringing Byrdsy chords and the kind of middle-class American subject matter that served as the foundation for a generation of future alt-rockers. This was something different. “It’s Good to be King” had a moody seriousness that suggested, for one of the first times in Tom Petty’s catalog, the great spiritual singer-songwriters of a generation or so before – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Robbie Robertson and the like. (It may also be the true, no doubt unintended, legacy of those one-off Wilbury projects.)
There are moments, surely, when Wildflowers is more fun (“You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “Honey Bee”), when it is louder (“You Wreck Me”) and, even, when it is quieter (“Time to Move On,” “Don’t Fade on Me”) But none is more effective in showing how rock can meaningfully mature as we do.
With “It’s Good to be King,” Tom Petty moved past the one-dimensional role of guitar-playing scruff. He owned up to the doubts of growing old, embraced middle-age wisdom along the way and, yet, ended up rocking some anyway.
It’s a place, true enough, that we still like to go from time to time.
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