Tom Petty has a posthumous number-one album as Wildflowers & All the Rest, a reissue of his 1994 album has made it to the top of Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart.
The number one ranking is based on the sale of 44,000 equivalent album units (38,000 downloads and physical sales, and 6.000 streams).This is Petty’s sixth number-one album and his first since his An American Treasure box set back in October 2018.
Petty is tied for the second-most number-one albums in Billboard Rock Album chart history along with Bruce Springsteen and Dave Matthews. John Mayer leads that category with seven.
Wildflowers also re-entered the Billboard 200 at number-five, three slots higher than its peak at number-eight 26 years ago. This is Petty’s eighth top five album and first since Hypnotic Eye hit the top spot in 2014.
Wildflowers was credited as a Petty solo album, but keyboardist Benmont Tench says it became a de facto Heartbreakers album:
"There was no talk about [drummer] Stanley [Lynch] leaving the band. They just wanted to record with a different rhythm section to get a different sound and make it a solo record. But then after it came out Steve [Ferrone] did join the band and then Stan left. Like at the beginning it wasn't like all of us. But by the end it pretty much was. You know, whatever reason he had to call it a solo
[courtesy of Classic Hits Today]