The 1977 lyrics too terrible for Jeff Lynne to use: “I hate that”
Half of what made any Jeff Lynne production great was the love and care that he put into every song.
It was never easy for him to make the best tunes on every ELO record, but the struggle is what made those records worth the price of admission when the opening overture to a tune like ‘Tightrope’ came on. But for all of the mechanics that were put into making every string section sound great or perfecting the right guitar riff, Lynne was always going to have a much harder time settling on what he wanted the lyrics to be on each of his songs.
Because for Lynne, lyrics were what usually came last of all during an album’s production. The whole appeal of any great pop song is the tune that people can hum in their heads throughout the rest of their day, and if that was more than half the battle, Lynne was going to put the proper time towards making the tunes the most important thing. Granted, there are some tunes in his arsenal that did make people think a lot more than the average rock and roll tune.
As much as people liked to compare ELO to The Beatles, not everything that Lynne made was John Lennon-worthy material, and even on some of his biggest albums, there are more than a few lyrics that sound a little bit trite to his ears. ‘Steppin’ Out’ was already a song that he wanted to cut when he was making Out of the Blue, but the whole premise of the band’s double record is being a one-stop shop for everything great about them, and you have to take the good with the bad on some of those tracks.
It’s usually worth it when you come upon tunes like ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and ‘Turn to Stone’, but ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’ had a much more laboured effort before it was ready for primetime. The tune is still one of the greatest in the band’s discography, but when Lynne was approaching the lyrics, he was ready to absolutely demolish the song and start again from scratch if that’s what the song needed.
The tune itself wasn’t all that bad, but when approaching the lyrics the first time, the initial draft that the band was working with was so terrible that Lynne ended up tearing the lyric sheet apart and starting again, saying, “I’d done all the words and everything, finished it. And I came down the next day in the studio and I went, ‘I hate that. Let’s rub all the vocals off. Get rid of everything off there. Whatever to do with the vocals.’ I’d been sitting up in the hotel, which is above the studio, working at night just trying to think of a new tune and new words, which I did. And tried it the next day and there they worked. So, it was a good job I did.”
We’ll never know what the original version of the song might have sounded like, but a lot of the lines seem to fit a lot better with how ELO presented themselves. The line about Lynne waiting for the operator on the other end of the telephone is a great callback to what he was singing about on ‘Telephone Line’, and when the chorus hits, it does carry a little bit of crossover from the tune ‘Evil Woman’ as well.
It might have been a bit redundant seeing him go back to the same kind of lyric all the time, but Lynne didn’t ever claim to be a wordsmith in the same way that every other songwriter was. He wanted the chance to make music that sounded like it was from the other side of the world, and the sound of someone trying to find a woman that was just out of reach isn’t all that hard to connect with the space theme.
Lynne could be a bit too hard on himself when talking about the best tunes that he ever created, but the fact that he could get millions of people singing along to tunes that weren’t his best was all that he could have asked for. After all, all great songs are about transcending words on a page, and the most universal language you can have is a bunch of people singing along with Lynne’s tunes from the other side of the universe.
