Richard Rodgers: the composer Jeff Lynne unknowingly copied for years
Originality is pursued by the masses, and achieved by very few, particularly within the realm of musical expression, as artists take on the influence and inspiration of more established voices, culminating in a vast landscape of pastiche, parody, and interpolation within which composers like Jeff Lynne have learned to thrive.
Nobody else compared to the eclectic sound of the Electric Light Orchestra when Lynne’s outfit first emerged during the early 1970s. With the emerging sounds of glam rock duking it out with prog, along with a litany of other uninspiring corporate rock records, ELO offered something entirely different, as though records like ‘10538 Overture’ were beamed down from the further reaches of outer space. At the core of that otherworldly output, though, was Lynne’s own expansive range of influences.
Namely, ELO were forever indebted to The Beatles, the root cause of virtually every rock and roll sound post-1966. An admitted devotee of the Fab Four, Lynne took a lot of inspiration from the band’s various advances in music production, along with their unparalleled aptitude for revolutionary songwriting. Ultimately, though, it takes more than one musician to make an orchestra (electric light-based, or otherwise), and some of Lynne’s influences were far more obscure than the Merseyside ‘Mop Tops’.
In fact, some of the sounds that went into ELO during those early days were so obscure that even Lynne himself didn’t become fully aware of them until decades later. During the production of the songwriter’s 2012 solo album Long Wave, for instance, he rediscovered the impact of one prolific composer. During an interview with Tape Op around that time, he shared, “There were times when I realised that I had actually used, without knowing it (like 35 years ago), some of the same chord changes that Richard Rodgers used.”
“I never realised it until I started to learn ‘If I Loved You’, from Carousel, the musical,” Lynne continued, namedropping one of Long Wave’s stand-out tracks in the process. Rodgers was a stalwart of American musical theatre for many years, penning 43 Broadway musicals stretching from 1917 to his death in 1977 and including a myriad of iconic productions, including Carousel, the show that impacted Jeff Lynne.
Explaining the impact of that particular track, Lynne shared, “So when I learned the chords to some of the greats, I realised I was actually using chords a bit like that. The naughty chords, as George [Harrison] used to call it — the diminished and the augmented.”
The songwriter has always found joy in the underutilised and forgotten aspects of composition, and those rogue chords are no different. “They’re great chords, and people don’t seem to use them very much nowadays,” he added. “They used to use them all the time. Richard Rodgers probably uses them ten times in a song.”
Seemingly, if those chords were good enough for Richard Rodgers, with a repertoire of tracks that not even the most tireless of songwriters could ever hope to match, they were good enough for Jeff Lynne, having followed him from his early ELO days to his 21st-century solo material.
