The 1976 song Jeff Lynne rescued with one chord: “It’s really interesting”
The essence of every good Jeff Lynne production usually comes from the sheer size of everything.
The ‘Orchestra’ in Electric Light Orchestra wasn’t put there by accident, and some of the best music that Lynne ever made was usually interested in going in many different directions that didn’t necessarily have to be the same Chuck Berry-style construction every single time he played. He wanted to take rock and roll even further, but that always meant finding the right melody to play over any chord progression.
Because all of Lynne’s productions seem to abide by the same rule that every other great rock and roll song is supposed to follow. As long as he was able to have the same effect on people when he was playing the tune on one guitar or piano in a room, then he knew that he had a great song. But the art behind getting a great song usually comes from hours trying to find out how the melody is supposed to move.
It’s nice to have those few songs that seem to fall out of the sky with no real rhyme or reason to them, but Lynne was meticulously crafting every single thing he made. He wasn’t going to rest when working with The Traveling Wilburys until everything sounded absolutely perfect, and he was going to hold himself up to the same standards once he made ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’. Out of the Blue was the moment where everything seemed to pay off, but the real pop gem came an album before.
A New World Record is still one of the finest pop albums of the 1970s, and a lot of that comes from Lynne toying around with different chords. No one would have thought of putting the strange diminished chords into the segues on ‘Telephone Line’ or creating an entire overture theme at the very beginning of ‘Tightrope’, but none of that mattered to Lynne compared to tunes like ‘Livin’ Thing’.
This was one of the first times where he felt like he outdid himself, and most of it came down to just one chord that he used, saying, “I’m particularly pleased with ‘Livin’ Thing,’ because I like the chorus, it’s really interesting. I think it’s interesting because there is one chord change that makes the whole thing work – and if I hadn’t found that it would never be a song.” But sometimes that one chord can make everything work out perfectly.
After all, Lynne was always a fan of The Beatles, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney usually had a habit of finishing each other’s songs based on one chord that changed everything. So if it took one chord that helped build a song like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, all it took was the right triad of notes to act as a bridge for the rest of the tune whenever Lynne sat down with his guitar and found the right note.
And in the context of the song, you can really feel that moment when the rest of the song takes off from there. The first part of the song almost feels like it’s floating in the air half the time during the verses, but as soon as that pivot chord happens, it feels like the audience is grounded for the first time in the song and they can take a breath, especially when the strings start playing those simple pentatonic runs.
Getting to that point in a song does often feel like a miracle half the time, but when someone does pull it off, it feels like everything slides right into place. And since Lynne would eventually work the same magic for Tom Petty on tunes like ‘Yer So Bad’, it’s safe to say that he has a sixth sense of what every single song needs.
