The 2012 album Jeff Lynne called the most beautiful songs: “Just thrilled”
Jeff Lynne wasn’t going to rest until all of his songs sounded absolutely perfect.
Half of the reason why ELO never toured in the back half of their career was that Lynne didn’t want to sacrifice what he heard in the studio, and listening to some of his greatest work, it’s not like he was ever trying to phone it in whenever making one of his musical symphonies. He felt that he would do anything to make the song sound right, but even if some tunes were better than others, he felt that certain albums had songs that were beyond comparison in his discography.
But it’s not like Lynne was ever one to talk himself up as one of the greatest of all time. He’s just happy to have written some great tunes during his lifetime, and when it came to working with some of his famous friends, he was proud to have at least held his own next to his fellow legends. Not everyone can make the remaining Beatles still sound amazing, but when Lynne got the group to resurrect their last songs, it felt like he sprinkled his own Beatles magic onto the tape.
In fact, most of Lynne’s favourite works that he ever did usually came down to what he was working on with other people. Of course, he could still have moments where he talked up tunes like ‘Turn to Stone’ and ‘Mr Blue Sky’ as moments where he nailed it in the studio, but when talking about the most fun that he’s ever had working on one of his projects, he usually gravitate more towards what he did with the Traveling Wilburys or his time going back and forth with Tom Petty on Full Moon Fever.
After taking a break from the studio, though, Lynne seemed to finally have the urge to make something on his own. Armchair Theatre was the only time he got to make a true solo album in his career, and while the last two ELO albums have been a decent look at what he could sound like in his older age, Long Wave was his excuse to make something a bit more sophisticated than everything else he had worked on.
Before he had even started to fall in love with rock and roll, he was already used to hearing standards coming out of every room in his house when he was a kid. A lot of those songs he knew like the back of his hand, and while it took him a long time to learn them whenever he played them, his voice sounded immaculate, gliding across tunes like ‘Beyond the Sea’ and ‘Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing’.
This kind of easy listening wasn’t going to impress the rock crowd, but by this point in his career, Lynne didn’t care so long as he could see the beauty of the tune, saying, “I really wanted to give these songs their due respect, because they’re so beautiful. It’s so rare to get a load of songs where the words are as good as the tune, and the chords are just superb. Everything about them – I’m just thrilled to play. So, learning all the bits of those was like going to university or something.”
And while a handful of great classic rockers have tried their hand at softer tunes, Lynne is one of the few who seem to have a genuine knack for it. His ear for arranging was always perfect in ELO, and given how great his voice still sounds, he’s able to bring a lot more nuance to a lot of the songs here, especially when lifting the tune up a little bit on a song like ‘She’ or managing to make a song like ‘At Last’ sound perfect without having to stand in the shadow of what Etta James brought to the original.
It might not have been the coolest thing for a musician to do, but Lynne was never afraid of trying something like this, either. He and George Harrison had already bonded over hearing some of the oldest songwriters in the world, and if Lynne could appreciate the musicality of someone like Hoagy Carmichael, he could certainly give the same level of respect to people like Rodgers and Hammerstein as well.
