Tom Petty – “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)”
When the late Tom Petty was working on his classic 1994 solo album Wildflowers, he recorded a whole lot of music that didn’t make it onto the LP. Before his death, Petty would talk about how he wanted to release an expanded version of Wildflowers. Sometime soon, Petty’s estate will reportedly release that expanded edition, though they haven’t announced all the details yet. Earlier this summer, they shared a demo version of the great Wildflowers single “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” And today, they’ve found a fun way to release a previously unheard track from those Wildflowers sessions.
“There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” is an acoustic folk-rock song that’s full of harmonica. It’s not as immediate as some of Petty’s most famous tracks, but it’s gorgeous, and it’s also totally fully-formed. We don’t know whether the recorded version of “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” was just a demo or whether it was fully finished, but it’s definitely a good enough song that it’s crazy to think we’re only just hearing it now.
To hear the song, you need to answer a five-question Wildflowers trivia quiz on Petty’s website. Once you get through all five questions — even if you only get three out of five, as I did — you get a free download of the song. (Or you could just listen to the version that someone uploaded to YouTube.)
Hopefully, that expanded edition of Wildflowers will be coming soon.