Did The Traveling Wilburys write an unofficial sequel to Roy Orbison’s masterpiece?
The history of rock and roll is littered with the ambitious, often bloated remains of the so-called supergroups, which too often feel assembled as sterile products of boardroom contracts rather than a result of genuine chemistry, promising a seismic musical event only to deliver something curiously hollow.
However, that certainly was not the case with The Traveling Wilburys, the loose-limbed 1988 collective of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty, who were a band that coalesced almost by accident and, in doing so, captured something far rarer than mere star power in the form of a genuine, unforced spirit.
The origins of the group were disarmingly simple, born from the fact that after Lynne produced the 1987 comeback record Cloud Nine for Harrison, the pair were simply reluctant to part ways. Harrison, who was never one to overcomplicate matters, floated the idea of starting a band, and before Lynne could finish asking who else should join the fold, he had already blurted out the name Bob Dylan.
The full line-up only properly materialised when Harrison found himself in need of a B-side for ‘This Is Love’ and, with no song ready, gathered whoever happened to be nearby, including Lynne and Orbison, picking up Petty along the way and headed to the home studio of Dylan in Santa Monica. What followed was ‘Handle With Care’, a track so effortlessly brilliant that Warner Bros Records refused to bury it on the flip side of a single, instead insisting that the ensemble produce a full-length album.
With just ten days to make the record happen, the group decamped to a modest guest house and transformed into the Wilburys, a fictional band of half-brothers complete with aliases and a tongue-in-cheek backstory courtesy of Michael Palin. Harrison was Nelson Wilbury, Lynne was Otis Wilbury, Orbison was Lefty Wilbury, Petty was Charlie T Wilbury Jr, and Dylan was Lucky Wilbury. It was a session defined by irreverence and an entirely refreshing lack of ego, yet for all their combined cultural weight, there was a quiet understanding within the group that this was, in part, the moment for Orbison. By the late 1980s, the ‘Big O’ was in the midst of a long-overdue renaissance, but his image remained perpetually tethered to the operatic heartbreak of his early hits, leaving him forever cast as the man behind ‘Only the Lonely’.
During those frantic, DIY sessions for Traveling Wilburys Vol 1, Harrison decided it was time to write a formal sequel to that legendary isolation, realising that the most iconic voice in rock did not necessarily have to be the lonely guy any more. This spark led directly to the creation of ‘Not Alone Any More’, which is a track that serves as the spiritual, unofficial successor to the early masterpieces of Orbison. As Petty recalled in a 2026 retrospective with Uncut: “We wanted to write one specifically for Roy. George said to Roy, ‘You’re known as the lonely guy from ‘Only The Lonely’; what if you had one where you’re not alone any more?’ That’s where ‘Not Alone Anymore’ came from.”
The resulting track is a masterclass of Wilbury production, with Lynne, a lifelong devotee of Orbison, crafting a sound cathedral that mirrored the soaring, linear crescendos of Monument-era hits such as ‘In Dreams’ or ‘Crying’. It began with a restrained, melancholic vocal before building into a shattering, high-note climax that proved the voice of Orbison was still an undiminished force of nature. While ‘Only the Lonely’ was a 1960 cry of desperation, ‘Not Alone Any More’ functioned as its 1988 resolution, and it took a Beatle to realise that the most tragic voice in music history deserved a moment where the shadows finally retreated.
Unfortunately, Orbison passed away from a heart attack on December 6th, 1988, just three weeks after the release of the album, leaving a void that his bandmates honoured in the music video for ‘End of the Line’ by featuring a rocking chair holding his guitar. Lynne later recalled in the wake of the death, the success of the album was “sickening”, and that the pair had planned to do much more together while the voice of Orbison was in such magnificent shape.
Although there was inevitable speculation in the press that Del Shannon or Roger McGuinn might step in, the remaining Wilburys never seriously considered replacing him, and while Orbison had spent a career singing about the depths of loneliness, in the end, surrounded by peers who revered him, he finally managed to escape it.
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