“Saddest of them all”: The song Jeff Lynne called his most depressing track
A long time ago, I had a particularly involved conversation with a friend centred on a single question. That question was, “What is your favourite ‘happy’ album?” It’s a question I still think resonates to this day for a number of reasons, but, in hindsight, I can’t believe neither of us at the time brought up anything by Jeff Lynne or his Electric Light Orchestra.
After all, happy music is associated with shallowness, right? More so than any other media, listening to a happy song is viewed as blinding yourself to the outside world and living in ignorance. This is not just a view held by edgy, alternative kids who think Turnstile sold out when they started releasing albums, either. Since the mid-2010s, pop music has taken a dramatically darker turn.
In 2010, Katy Perry was ruling the airwaves with the carefree summery disco of ‘California Gurls’. Just under a decade later, Billie Eilish was releasing ‘Everything I Wanted’, a global smash hit about suicide ideation. She’s not alone, though. Pop music reflects the mood of the world more directly than any other medium, and pop music has been desperately sad for a while now.
So, surely, Lynne’s band are the antithesis of that, right? The Electric Light Orchestra is the group that shows that pop music can be gloriously happy yet complex, both in emotional depth and in musicality. We’ve seen enough montages in film and TV set to ‘Mr Blue Sky’, or bopped along to the absurdly catchy riff of ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’. We’ve even marvelled at their ability to work actual Beethoven excerpts into their cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. That’s what they’re all about, right?
Is the music Jeff Lynne made with ELO really that happy?
Well, what it really depends on is your definition of ‘happy music’. ELO’s work is, by and large, bright, upbeat and ludicrously catchy – but its emotional depth is often underrated. And that’s the ultimate truth of a lot of so-called ‘happy music’. But is it still just ‘happy’ when it reckons directly with the worst times its creator has been through?
Jeff Lynne has been very open about how this was the case for most of the music he made for ELO. In an interview with Classic Rock magazine, he talked about this directly, saying, “I always thought our music was sad. Whenever people say ‘Wow, your songs makes me feel so good’, I think: ‘Hold on, I’m writing about loneliness.’”
He goes on to talk specifics, too, via a look at what he considered the saddest song he’d ever written. He said, “‘Telephone Line’ is the saddest of them all. It was written just after an American tour. I’d got a girlfriend over there and she wasn’t answering the phone. That’s why I used the sound of the American dialling tone. It was all about long‑distance telephone calls. Touring played havoc with relationships and anything like that.”
So, is it true? Is the only genuine music dark and depressing, while anything upbeat is trying to sell you something? No, of course not. The truth is that this kind of music resonates with so many people because it empathises with how they’re feeling and makes them feel better about what they’re going through. Like most things one talks about when they were a teenager, my friend and I were asking the wrong questions.
We were thinking about happy and sad as binaries in music, and instead of asking what music ‘sounds’ happy, we should have been asking what music makes us ‘feel’ happy. Nevertheless, Jeff Lynne and his ELO are the perfect example of a band capable of giving you both.
