ELO Guru Reboots Old Songs, Preps New Ones
Though he fronted the Electric Light Orchestra since its 1970 inception and was part of the short-lived Traveling Wilburys, Jeff Lynne is primarily a behind-the-scenes figure. The studio has always been his primary playground more so than the stage, and beyond his own endeavors he’s produced the likes of fellow Wilburys George Harrison, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison as well as Brian Wilson, Dave Edmunds, Del Shannon, Joe Walsh and others. And then there was that other little gig, working with Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on the new songs they recorded for “The Beatles Anthology.”
Lynne himself has recorded just one solo album, “Armchair Theatre” in 1990, but he emerges on Oct. 9 with two labors of love: “Long Wave,” a collection of rock oldies and pop standards he heard on radio while growing up in England; and “Mr. Blue Sky — The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra,” comprised of one-man recreations of 11 of the group’s favorites plus the new song “Point of No Return.”
Lynne talked with Billboard about weaving this particularly kind of “Strange Magic” and keeping music a “Livin’ Thing” in his life…
So somebody’s been keeping busy, apparently.
Yep, I’m afraid so. (laughs) I’ve been working on both these albums for probably about three years or so. The old ones, “Long Wave,” is just a labor of love, really. I just had to do them. It was an urge I had in the last few years; I really wanted to do some of these classic songs and just learn how they all went, and just learning them was a real treat. It was like going to music university to really discover all these harmonies and chord changes and bass parts and how brilliantly they’re written. So there was a lot of finding out some great stuff and really enjoying myself, musically.
And the ELO album?
That started out because I really wanted to see if I could get “Mr. Blue Sky” (the song) better, because I used to hear it on the radio…actually all my songs that are on there, I used to listen and go, “Wow, that’s not quite how I meant it.” So I tried “Mr. Blue Sky” to see what it would be like to re-record one and finish it and make it into a brand new record, and I enjoyed the results of that so much that I tried another one and another one and decided I would do the whole lot — not the whole lot, but make an album’s worth of them, just so people could hear them in a different way and probably the way I intended them to be heard in the first place. READ MORE
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ELO Guru Reboots Old Songs, Preps New Ones was originally published on mycolumbusjack.com