A model middle-aged album. Leaner, cleaner, wiser, wearier. Rick Rubin is working with Petty as producer and it’s a refreshing, earthy change from Jeff Lynne’s shinier approach. These songs are all written from the top of the mountain. Petty has already made it ten times over and he doesn’t need to swagger. That posture was always enjoyable — he wore it well — but age and confidence open up an ocean of resonance. This album makes me feel like I’ve driven around Gainsville and it changed: more connected to summer nights, broken skylines, listening to the radio, something fading, stumbling into a bar I don’t belong in, finding a girl and escaping into a field, giggling, wondering later if I’m wasting it all.

“Time to Move On” has such an easy feel, you can miss the artistry. It contains a strange quality of being fast and slow at the same time, like a stoned Buddy Holly. The whole album is like this — easy. His vocals riding the back of the beat, even as the drums charge forward. It all coalesces into a philosophical statement — alive, stubborn and hurtin’, ain’t rushin’ for no one. Perhaps “Wildflowers” is the resurrection of his abandoned 1985 concept album, “Southern Accents”. With that project lost, Petty traded out the big idea for three collaborations with David Stewart (Eurythmics) and one grab bag. Had 1985 Petty been chasing after the zeitgeist? It certainly worked with “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” with Stewart’s synthesized atmosphere with Petty’s spooky snarl. The hits on “Wildflowers” aren't aiming for the charts, but “You Don’t Know How it Feels” and “It’s Good to be King” got there anyway.

It’s not all drawl. There are a couple of rockers on the album — “You Wreck Me” being the best of the bunch. It launches out of the gate with a tough riff and a sturdy chorus. But, third verse is the winner: “I’ll be the boy in he corduroy pants, you’ll be the girl at the High School dance”. Petty pulls from the well of Americana, and his anthems are a little achier than you remember. He has a great ear for the universal. He’s smart, but not so much you think he’s above you, never overly poetic, always graciously serving the song. He looks for those underdog lyrics, something with a little more wisdom than you thought the kid at the back of the class had in him. He’s a sneaky poet, secretly dreamy.

That dreamy side comes though in the title track, a delicate, acoustic number about a girl who belongs among the wildflowers. It has an unabashed innocence to it, conjuring paradise for all the characters are looking for. “House in the Woods,” on the other hand, is a love song that sounds like southern gothic killing. A seductive blend of slide guitar and huge crashing cords summon the mystery and grace of the southern landscape. The words declare love, but the guitars pound out the danger, like a murder out in the pines. Petty’s ability to capture both these things — innocence and ruin — is what dazzles us. One never swallows the other. Ruin is averted, and innocence is fortified with experience.

Maybe the secret to mid-life revelation was Petty’s capacity to channel his own aging right into the mix. One of his very best, “Crawling Back to You,” has a weariness only gained from experience. On the surface, it’s a relationship song, but on the third listen it’s about anything that brought you to your knees and then kept pulling you forward anyway — a dream, a goal, a career in Rock n’ Roll.

The closer, “Wake up Time,” is also soaked with time and loss. The piano sounds like it was recored in an abandoned plantation house, locating the melancholy flip-side to the chunky, gothic chords from “House in the Woods.” Again Petty pulls his trick, summoning all the pain of this world — a boy a long way from home — and balancing it with a lyric about opening your eyes, about waking up. The depth of this song is astounding, a fallen high school star, adrift in disappointment, on a canvas wide enough to hold us all. In the middle, as if knowing how absorbed we are in this spell, Petty starts speaking, like he’s your friend from above: “Yeah, you’ll be all right, it’s gonna just take time.” Gosh — he makes it sound so easy.

by Steve Collins