The 1976 tune Jeff Lynne called his only good love song: “One of my favourite chords”
Recently, during an intense period of courting, I made someone a romance playlist, and picking from the seemingly endless list of classic love songs, new and old, was an almost impossible task… Which songs best translate that giddy feeling of budding romance, sonically, lyrically, semantically, without coming across as brash or cheesy?
After landing on a few goldies, like Labi Siffre’s ‘Bless the Telephone’, Broadcast’s ‘Colour Me In’ and Magdalena Bay’s ‘Love Is Everywhere’, I realised something that feels initially paradoxical – some of the best love songs are heartbreak songs, too, and what better way to explain how life-changing love feels in the moment you lose it all… Only with hindsight does the true measure, merit, and meaning of love make itself known.
Though it took panicked scrambling and scrolling on my end to figure out this fact, Jeff Lynne knew it from the start. The Electric Light Orchestra legend rejected the overly kitsch, cutesy, and, in his words, “kissy”, for a more monumental, refined approach to capturing love’s ineffable essence.
In a 1990 radio interview with Classic Albums, the songwriter looked back on a lavish 1976 classic, ‘Shangri-La’, which closed out their sixth studio album, A New World Record. Coincidentally, it’s the one love song Lynne is actually proud of across his discography.
He explained, “‘Shangri-La’ was my attempt at a sort of love song. Like a love song that wasn’t too blatantly… ‘kissy’ type of thing. Y’know?” The song’s opening makes it evident that the singer isn’t reaching for grand gestures: “Sitting here waiting for someone calling at my door. Too bad, I’m getting out of love.”
Ever the humble artist, Lynne admitted that he made this decision simply because he “can’t do” love songs. He added, “I really like that because just the string parts worked out really good. Um. There’s a lot of minor seventh flat fifths in there, in case you’re interested. And that one’s on a lot. It’s one of my favourite chords.”
The five-and-a-half-minute epic track contains the famous line, “My Shangri-la has gone away, faded like the Beatles on ‘Hey Jude‘” – by referencing another classic love song written eight years before, he places the track in the love song canon and calls attention to the epic proportions of the lost love without acting overly grandiose or overbearing.
Instead, Lynne lifts the concept of Shangri-La from James Hilton’s 1933 utopian novel, Lost Horizon, where Shangri-La is a harmonious valley hidden in the Himalayan Mountains – the narrative concept is used to stand in for the perfect relationship, his paradise in the earthly realm.
Adding to the expansive literary reference, the ending soars into a futuristic call-and-response outro that bursts, sonically, into the melodramatic. Lynne insists that he will return to Shangri-la, only to hear ghostly voices echoing, forever out of reach. The love grows legs, arms, and a mouth, and taunts the lyricist, who longs for the kind of love he once found to persist.
Looks like I’ve found another track for that love playlist.
