The Electric Light Orchestra lyric Jeff Lynne gets wrong on purpose
Throughout their existence as a group, Electric Light Orchestra, or more accurately, Jeff Lynne, has always been partial to squeezing in a hidden message or two into their songs.
Whether it’s the talkbox voice at the end of the album version of ‘Mr Blue Sky’ instructing the listener “please turn me over” to mark the end of the side of vinyl it appeared on, the liberal use of backmasking, whereby the band would deliberately place messages played in reverse on songs, or even hiding morse code that spells out ‘ELO’ in the string section of ‘Secret Messages’, Lynne loved to hide easter eggs in his projects, which the fans seemingly lapped up every time.
However, when you’re of this disposition, and as inclined as Lynne has always been to hide little jokes in his music, people are often going to assume that you’re always looking for an opportunity to do this, whether or not that is indeed the case. As a result, many ELO fans have come to the conclusion that one of Lynne’s trademark pranks appears on their 1979 hit, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, but in actual fact, fans have been wilfully mishearing the lyrics to the song all along.
Many have questioned who the figure of ‘Bruce’ that Lynne addresses in the song’s chorus is, but after singing the song’s title, it turns out that he was never asking this unidentified ‘Bruce’ person not to bring him down, whether that’s Springsteen or Forsyth. In fact, Lynne would later reveal that during the recording sessions, he had to improvise in order to prevent there being a dead space.
“This one I made up in the studio, and I play all the instruments,” he later explained of the recording process. After continuing to break down the song’s elements, he would then state the origins of how this erroneous ‘Bruce’ came to appear in the song. “When I was singing it, there was a gap in the vocals, so I just shouted out ‘groose’. It was a word that came to my head. The engineer said that it meant ‘greetings’ in German [German spelling: Gruße], which I thought was lovely and decided to leave it in. When I went onstage with it, everyone would sing ‘Bruce’. I just ended up singing ‘Bruce’ as well.”
The thing is, it wouldn’t have been out of character for Lynne to start speaking to an unspecified character in a song, so for fans to assume that this was the case isn’t exactly a stretch. However, the fact that he had ostensibly made up a word, only for fans to then think he was saying something else entirely, goes to show that he was always one step ahead of the listener when it came to fooling around with them.
It’s perhaps one of the most commonly misheard lyrics in the history of popular music, but for Lynne to eventually concede that it was easier to go along with the fans’ interpretation makes the confusion that it caused all the more amusing.
