Juliana Hatfield announces Electric Light Orchestra tribute album
American singer Juliana Hatfield has announced a brand new album of Electric Light Orchestra covers entitled Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO.
“ELO songs were always coming on the radio when I was growing up. They were a reliable source of pleasure and fascination,” Hatfield said in a press release. “With this album of covers I wanted to get my hands deep into some of the massive ’70s hits but I am also shining a light on some of the later work… My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.”
The album is Hatfield’s third full-album tribute after having previously recorded full LPs of covers by The Police and Olivia Newton-John. Newton-John and the Electric Light Orchestra previously collaborated on the 1980 number-one hit ‘Xanadu’, providing some connective tissue and shared DNA between Hatfield’s projects.
To preview the upcoming LP, Hatfield has shared her cover of ELO’s eternal 1979 hit single ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. The track is just one of a number of notable songs from the ELO catalogue that will be included on the album, including ‘Telephone Line’, ‘Strange Magic’, and ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’.
“ELO’s ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ is such a solid construction that trying to rework it initially felt like taking a sledgehammer to concrete,” Hatfield noted. “I didn’t worry about matching all the original’s exact sounds and parts, and we even dared a few cymbal crashes (the ELO version has one famously unchanging drum loop–no crashes—from start to finish). This is not a radical reinvention but it is a little more bubbly.”
Check out the cover of ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ below. Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO is set for a November 17th release.
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