Sometimes it’s a single word, a few letters. One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers & All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. He had a knack for assembling simple, everyday words into spacious and evocative phrases: Even on the page, to say nothing of all he brings to the recorded vocal, there’s an entire short story in the five words, “And I’m free/Free fallin’.” Petty had long proven himself to be a writer of incisive economy - a rock ’n’ roll Hemingway in tinted shades.

(There are also 14 more home recordings, a live album, a disc of alternate takes and unreleased recordings of the 10 other tracks that would have made the cut had “Wildflowers” become the double album that Petty, who died in 2017, initially intended.) In a murmured vocal, Petty sounds like a man fumbling for a light switch and never quite finding it, though a quick flash of luminescence brings a lyric that expresses something simple and true: “Far away from your trouble and worry,” he sings in his tender drawl, “You belong somewhere you feel free.” The extraordinary new collection “ Wildflowers & All the Rest” lets listeners experience that mystical, intimate moment: The first home-recorded demo of “Wildflowers” is among the five-disc release’s many spoils. “I swear to God, it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he later told the writer Paul Zollo of the title track from his melancholic and masterful second solo album, “Wildflowers.” “I turned on my tape-recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish.” One day in 1993, Tom Petty opened his mouth, and a new song came out, fully formed.

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