The musicians so good that Jeff Lynne hated them: “I have come to love them now”
Throughout his time working behind the producer’s chair, Jeff Lynne has turned himself into the almighty maestro of rock and roll. Many songs have had his signature touch added to them, but unless they have his signature wall of sound behind them, tunes by everyone from Tom Petty to Joe Walsh may have never worked properly. While it’s no small feat to call yourself one of the few producers The Beatles approved of, Lynne wasn’t shy of saying some tunes were outside of his limitations.
After all, Lynne was always going to be a student of rock and roll before anything else. He had a passing knowledge of how to arrange the sounds he heard in his head, but listening to his records, his strength always lay in approaching his tunes like a singer-songwriter would and placing big arrangements around them.
Take a tune like ‘Evil Woman’, for instance. The strings and the organ might be playing some intricate lines on the surface, but when looking at them in relation to the guitar, it’s easy to assume that Lynne may have worked out the parts on the guitar and simply transposed them to the orchestra to make the whole thing sound full. The same could be said of ‘Livin’ Thing’, with the string section line being ripped straight from the pentatonic scale every novice guitarist knows.
But that doesn’t mean that Lynne is any lesser a musician for it. He has been able to make that sound his own and even add some new genius to his work by finding ways to slightly twist that style of production. Those hits might be successful because people can sing along to them, but no one’s ever going to look at a track like ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and claim that they can do the exact same thing.
“I used to hate them as a kid, but I have come to love them now.”
jeff lynne
For someone who worked so closely with orchestras, though, the next step would be to bring some true classics to life from the theatrical world. Although ELO was always accustomed to those kinds of tight-knit shows, Lynne remembered shaking in his boots the first time he chose to step to a few Rodgers and Hammerstein arrangements for the album Long Wave.
By theatre standards, these are virtually untouchable arrangements, and Lynne even resisted playing anything for it for the longest time, saying, “I used to hate them as a kid, but I have come to love them now. The arrangements were too complicated, too flowery, and frankly, had put me off from learning them. It’s only been in the last few years that I have recorded these songs. I just dove in and learned the basic song and tried to understand them and see if I could make it work.”
When looking at how well-structured the tunes were to begin with, though, Lynne had a field day trying to modernise them for a new age. And listening to his takes on the tunes, it never once feels like he’s doing the cheap version of what the original was supposed to be. He was always a professional, and even if he didn’t understand it, it was well worth his trying to figure out what made those songs work back in the day.
After that kind of experience, Lynne seemed to cross a threshold as a songwriter. Working on The Beatles Anthology would never stop being a rush for him, but fine-tuning the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein is another kind of musical peak that only a few are able to achieve.
