10 Perfect Songs That Were Written Incredibly Fast

When Tom Petty was asked about how he write songs, he always said that he doesn't really want to know what he was doing. All of the great songs tend to write themselves, and the magic that Tom taps into normally comes from it being just the right time and having one of the lyrics come to you right out of the air. It's a cosmic feeling a lot of the time, but what happened with Wildflowers was practically a gift from the musical gods.

While Petty had talked about writing a song a day during the recording of albums like Full Moon Fever, what you're hearing on this song is the result of Tom just having a good day in his rehearsal room and deciding to play his acoustic for a little bit. When he sat down to start writing, Tom had said that the final version was what came out on his first pass through the tune, being fully formed in the moment with only a handful of lyrics not in place yet.

The whole thing came so quickly that Tom initially thought that the song wasn't ready to be included on an album, knowing that it would probably need something extra to add in once the Heartbreakers brought their spin to it. The magic was all there from the beginning though, being just a nice song wishing your loved ones well. Tom definitely had a trademark sound by this point, but this song is practically something that came out of his soul before he even had time to comprehend what he was doing.