The five best lyrics by Jeff Lynne

‘Melting In the Sun’

“The wheels of life will stretch your face / Squeeze you flat without a trace / But when I was in trouble, I never heard you speak / I got the message that I’m in too deep”.

It’d been 15 years since the world was treated to an ELO record when the much-awaited Zoom swept into music stores in 2001. Warmly received albeit not without critique, Lynne showed he could still craft a hooky symphonic rock with their 12th LP effort, captured in the rolling rock of ‘Melting In the Sun’.

Surrounded by the signature vocal harmonies, he paints a visceral lyrical picture of life’s fraught dangers and pitfalls, often signalled by a calm before the storm, that points all too clearly that you’re in serious bother. With ‘Melting In the Sun’, Lynne peppers his cautionary tale of mileage that can only come from captaining a band with the decades having passed by in all their storied tumult.

‘Livin’ Thing’

“It’s a livin’ thing / It’s a terrible thing to lose / It’s a givin’ thing / What a terrible thing to lose”.

Sometimes, lyrics work best when possessed with just a dash of biting ambiguity, and underneath its cheerful chorus, A New World Record’s lead single, ‘Livin’ Thing’, laments the loss of something assumed to be held dear. It’s a wry little lyrical trick up Lynne’s songwriting sleeves, masking a line that is faintly evocative and full of questions.

What exactly is the “terrible thing to lose”? According to the lyricist, it’s a broad statement on the loss of love; however, the number’s seeds were planted from a nasty bout of food poisoning. “You’ll never be able to listen to it the same again,” he told Hi-Fi News & Record Review in 2014, “I wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s about a bad paella on a Spanish holiday”.

‘Evil Woman’

“Rolled in from another town / Hit some gold, too hard to settle down / But a fool and his money soon go separate ways / And you found a fool lyin’ in a daze”.

Reportedly, 1975’s Face the Music was largely in the can before its lead single was even written. Worried that ELO’s fifth LP lacked an obvious radio hit, Lynne sent the band out of the studio and quickly worked out an R&B-style number at the piano, taking square, lyrical aim at a woman who’s supposedly cropped up in numerous ELO songs of the day.

Standing as one of their definitive cuts, ‘Evil Woman‘s’ spurned, broiling pot of grievances is expertly splashed across its urgent canvass, yielding a number crackling with narked fervour. Possessed with a sharp narrative anchor, Lynne casts himself as the possible hapless “fool”, crossing paths with the titular temptress and the trail of heartache that clearly leapt out of his lyrical pen like an animal.

‘Telephone Line’

“Hello, how are you? Have you been alright all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights? That’s what I’d say.”

The power of subversion always glows with undimmed allure, and that’s what you get with these lyrics on ‘Telephone Line’. At first, you think that Lynne is talking to a lover, someone on the other end of the phone who he’s away from; however, that final line, “That’s what I’d say”, tells the listener he isn’t speaking to anyone other than a dial tone, where instead of a “hello” he is met with a telephone line silence.

The beauty of this opener is that the final line flips the introduction’s meaning so that it’s almost as if Lynne is asking himself the question. “I sound really desperate and lonely on this one, and maybe I was,” he noted when discussing the track, adding, “It’s about trying to find a girl every night, and you just can’t get through to her. It was a scenario I thought of, but maybe it was prompted by the fact that I wasn’t happy at the time.”

‘Midnight Blue’

“Can’t you feel the love that I’m offering you? Can’t you see how it’s meant to be? Can’t you hear the words that I’m saying to you? Can’t you believe like I believe? It’s only one and one, it’s true, still, I see you in midnight blue”

There are plenty of different ways to write lyrics; you can be literal, metaphorical, absurd, sarcastic, and all things in between. Because of the range of ways that people can write and subsequently interpret lyrics, there are plenty of reasons you might like what an artist is saying. The hours one can spend reading into what a musician is attempting to convey and trying to unpack their meaning is a part of Lynne’s enduring lyrical power.

Love is arguably the most covered topic by any artist, and as such, it can be difficult reading a lyric that particularly moves you, given that we come across them all the time. Enter Jeff Lynne on the sweet and serene ‘Midnight Blue’ with a plea, a declaration, and an ode to longing that grows more and more beautiful every time you listen to it.