10 Perfect Albums That Artists Don't Want To Talk About

If you were to ask Tom Petty, Wildflowers marked the moment where everything started to go wrong in his personal life. Despite having some of the greatest songs of his solo career on it, Tom had started to see himself growing more and more distant from his family, leading to his messy divorce that came just a few years later. If this was the divorce album though, Echo was the aftermath of all that emotional turmoil.

Though Petty's idols like Bob Dylan liked to put their emotions out there on records like Blood on the Tracks, Echo is in a bit of a different space, as Petty lays into himself more often than not and tries to make sense of what life is like without one of the most important people in his life. There are little wisps of anger and heartache on songs like the title track or Swingin, but the real tragedy that the band were facing was what happened whenever they went into the studio to work.

Around the same time that Petty was separating from his wife, bassist Howie Epstein was starting to lose his battle with heroin addiction, always turning up with just the right part but clearly spiraling out of control behind the scenes. While Echo definitely has some strong songs on it, Tom has always tried to distance himself from it, with Howie's passing a short time after casting a dark shadow over the sessions. We might be hearing just some great music, but Tom was probably just hearing ghosts from the past.