The best “guitar song” Jeff Lynne ever wrote
The whole purpose behind every Jeff Lynne song was to create the perfect sound in the studio.
While every ELO track did have more than a few standout moments from the orchestra or stretched Lynne’s vocal ability, he was always interested in having each instrument bounce off of each other in the same way that they did when he listened to his favourite Beatles records. But that doesn’t mean that he wanted to discount those moments where he could really fly off the handle in the studio as well.
After all, if you have that many great musicians in your band, it would be foolish not to show them off a little bit. From the first time people heard the strings come in on the track ‘10538 Overture’, it already sounded like one of the biggest rock bands the heavens ever spat out, but after getting the baroque period out of their system, Lynne’s genius always came from how he could use rock instruments to create that kind of orchestral swell.
The strings always had a prominent place in the band, but the beauty of hearing every new ELO record was hearing the guitars and drums become a part of the orchestra half the time. Even when the strings started weaving together different sections, you could almost picture Lynne arranging their parts on the electric guitar and then transferring that music over to the violins when he had everything finalised.
But while Out of the Blue has some of the most extravagant moments of the band’s career on it, A New World Record actually does a much better job at balancing out the rock instruments. ‘Tightrope’ is one of the most epic opening tracks that the decade ever spat out, but when looking at ‘Rockaria’ and ‘So Fine’, there was a lot more guitar prominence in the mix when playing against the strings.
Even though Lynne could write hits in his sleep by that point, he felt that remaking ‘Do Ya’ gave the album the six-string muscle it needed, saying, “It was a big song, like big loud, like a loud song, um, mainly just guitars. And it was never heard really. The guitars are really distorted on it. But it’s good. [It’s] my favorite guitar song, because that’s the loudest guitar song that I do.” If you listen to the track, though, the qualifier “loud guitars” is almost underselling it.
The sound that Lynne got on these sessions felt like walls of guitars hitting you every time he played those massive chords. It was all major chords and didn’t really do anything flashy by any stretch, but whenever the chords moved, it felt like a piledriver every single time they hit your eardrums. And it’s not like Lynne’s fellow Wilburys weren’t taking notice when they heard what he could do.
George Harrison had his moments of going out onstage with ELO from time to time, but Tom Petty wanted to see if he could find some magic of his own by following Lynne’s lead. It’s hard to call a song like ‘Change of Heart’ a rip-off of ‘Do Ya’, but listening to the way that the chords move around, it’s clear that Petty had a little bit of inspiration from his fellow rocker when constructing the tune.
While there’s a lot of muscle behind the track, Lynne never seemed to overdo the production for the hell of it, either. ‘Do Ya’ was a song that needed a little bit more muscle for it to come across effectively, and even if it became one of the biggest hits that the band had during that initial run, he was far more content to have made a classic and move on to whatever rock symphony came into his head next.
