The 1945 song Jeff Lynne thought he would never make “in a million years”
Nothing was really off the table when Jeff Lynne started to get behind the board in the studio.
He wanted ELO to take as many chances as they could, and even though he was trying to cover the ground that The Beatles never got to cover, it’s not like he was afraid to make his songs sound like the Fab Four every now and again. But even after rubbing elbows with some of the greatest rock and roll stars of all time, Lynne felt that every album still had the opportunity to surprise him.
Because, really, there was no chance that anyone thought that Lynne would have rebranded ELO in his twilight years to record two more albums. He was happy to make music for other people, but when listening to a lot of those later songs, what strikes you most when you put them on is how youthful his voice sounds. That tone never truly went away, and a lot of his better songs from this period involved him taking a few cues from where he had already been.
Alone in the Universe felt like something that could have come out back in 1976, and with Lynne’s higher register, he wasn’t afraid to re-record some of his old songs to see how they sounded. He could have always done a little bit better when working on tunes from Out of the Blue, so why not try and give ‘Mr Blue Sky’ the kind of musical sheen that it was always destined to have?
For all of the great rock songs that he’s made over the years, though, making an album of pop standards was definitely a step out of his comfort zone. A lot of the tunes from the pre-rock and roll era were a lot more complicated than anyone would have imagined, but once Lynne started to internalise what he was singing, it was a lot easier than he realised getting a song like ‘Beyond the Sea’.
A lot of the songs on Long Wave ended up having the same kind of diminished chords that he loved using in ELO, and while they did sound retro, he was working to give them their modern sheen. There was no way that he was going to ever do justice to Etta James’s ‘At Last’ by trying to outright copy her, but part of the appeal of this album was seeing what he could turn the songs into whenever he put down the arrangement.
And when he settled on what turned into his version of ‘If I Loved You’, he thought he made something that he wouldn’t have even dreamed of doing in his prime, saying, “I only learned to love them when I just learned how to play them in the past couple of years. Like, for instance, ‘If I Loved You’ from Carousel. I never dreamed in a million years that I’d be singing that flipping thing. But it was actually the most marvellous thing, the most fun I ever had recording it. I just loved it. And once I got it right, I was frightened to death to sing it.”
It wasn’t necessarily going to be cool for him to make this kind of jump, but it wasn’t about him trying to play towards what the radio wanted. It was like the Wild West for classic rockers at this stage of his career, and if Lynne could pull off making some of the final Beatles recordings, he was more than happy to take a swing at songs that Bobby Darin made famous and see what happened with them.
This would have been the height of uncool had he tried it during the days of ‘Evil Woman’ and ‘Tightrope’, but Lynne didn’t really need to care about credibility at this point. He was already a legend, so what was the problem with his getting a little nostalgic and releasing an album that captured the songs of his childhood?
