Tom Petty was in his happy place. His fortress of solitude. His backyard recording studio. The one part of the house where everyone knew better than to tread while he was in there by himself dreaming, and writing, and recording. “You didn’t open that door unless the house was on fire,” his daughter Adria Petty said. “My dad spent most of his time in his life quarantined in his house or on the road, basically. But he had that room and he’d just go in that room every single day and work and close the door.”

On this particular day, he had a new idea that he wanted to get down on tape. He didn’t have any lyrics written down to guide him, just a simple three-chord progression and some vague visions of the Santa Barbara countryside in all its lush, colorful springtime splendor. So, he hit the big red record button on the tape machine, took a deep breath and began to strum. As the jaunty acoustic guitar in his hands filled the room with a capoed, sonorous chime, he opened his mouth and started to sing.

“You belong among the wildflowers / You belong on a boat out at sea.”

Who knows where those tenderly delivered words came from. Petty certainly didn’t. “I swear to God it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he told author Paul Zollo for his book Conversations With Tom Petty. In the next three minutes, Petty waxed poetic about love and freedom, heart and home while the reels on his recorder spun around in a steady rotation. When the song came to its seemingly natural conclusion he reached over his guitar and clicked the stop button. “Then [I] sat back and went, ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head.”

[Read Corbin Reiff's story of how Tom Petty's Wildflowers, which is being celebrated with a new box set, came together.]