Tom Petty‘s second solo album, 1994’s Wildflowers, features several hit songs, including “Wildflowers,” “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and “To Find A Friend.”
“To Find A Friend” opens up with an image of a middle-aged man ending his marriage. In an interview about the Wildflower record from the 2021 documentary, Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free, Petty explained that the events depicted in “To Find a Friend” mirror his and his first wife, Jane Benyo‘s breakup.
“‘To Find a Friend,’ it’s just a beautiful little song, but I think subconsciously it probably had something to do with my life, you know, because I was becoming disenchanted with my marriage at the time,” said Petty, who finalized his divorce from Benyo in 1996 after 22 years of marriage.
He clarified that while his and Benyo’s “marriage was falling apart” during the production of Wildflowers, he didn’t think he was intentionally trying to make an album about a divorce.
“I wasn’t really thinking along a thematic line. But when I hear it, I can see that it was working in the back of my mind somewhere,” said the musician, who died in 2017 at the age of 66.
Petty and Benyo’s daughter, Adria Petty, now 51, also shared her thoughts about how her parents’ divorce impacted the making of Wildflowers. During an interview seen in Somewhere You Feel Free, Adria said that while her mother and father’s bond “was crazy big,” she noticed that “there were things on this record,” specifically in “To Find a Friend,” “where you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, a paper in the wind, I get it.'”
“You’re preparing us for the cliché of what you’re about to have to go through to get out of this relationship,” continued Adria.
In addition, she said that the Wildflower album has several lines “that are so indicative of him being in a time of change.”
“He had sort of this complete escape in the music at that point. There’s not any other album I can point to in particular that so strongly reflected what his psychological state of mind was at the time that he was making it. So in that way, I think it’s very personal,” said Adria in the interview.