The best pop album Jeff Lynne said ELO ever made: “The album was a step up”
There’s a certain section of pop music that Jeff Lynne knows like the back of his hand.
No one may have been asking to make the same kind of musical detours that David Bowie did when he first put together ELO, but when listening to every single album, they were inching that much closer to making the best album that anyone had ever heard. And even decades after their prime, Lynne had to admit that he was building to something great when he started landing on the catchiest tunes of his career.
But should we expect anything less from someone who practically had The Beatles as his glorified teachers? Everything that Lynne did was about trying to match what the Fab Four were working with, and listening to his albums, it’s easy to see why. Not only does his songwriting sound a lot like those early Beatles recordings, but the way he arranges everything felt like a symphonised version of what the band were doing during their experimental period on ‘I Am the Walrus’.
It was a great sound, but it makes sense why it wasn’t exactly for everybody, either. Roy Wood knew things were getting too technical for him before the band started gaining traction, but that didn’t seem to matter to Lynne. If anything, he had more control over everything, and when it came to making records like On the Third Day, he was already beginning to show his chops as one of the best melodists of his time on ‘Showdown’.
The rest of the world managed to catch on when Eldorado stormed up the charts, but ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ was more like a warning sign. Lynne was only getting warmed up, and when listening to records like Face the Music, all signs were pointing to him making pop music perfection. Even with all that momentum, though, no one saw A New World Record coming when it first came out.
While the album does have the same kind of sonic cohesion you’d think on a typical concept album, Lynne was never looking to go in that direction. He did a lot of his best work making quality tunes, and across every single song, there’s never a moment where the record falters. ‘Tightrope’ kicks down the door perfectly, ‘Telephone Line’ is one of the best ballads they ever made, and even if you look past the hits like ‘Do Ya’, tracks like ‘Mission’ have the kind of energy that only he could pull off.
He had been around the horn more than a few times, but Lynne felt that he really outdid himself with pop songs on this record, saying, “I think we all knew the album was a step up, in accessibility, image, everything. They might be the catchiest tunes we ever did as a set, but when you write songs you don’t suddenly think, ‘Oh, I’ve learned how to do it now!’ You never have, and you never know if you’re going to write another one.”
What’s even crazier is realizing that the real masterpiece was yet to come. Out of the Blue may have been a bit much for everyone to take in when they first heard it, but ‘Mr Blue Sky’ simply wouldn’t have existed had Lynne not learned the lessons from A New World Record, always focusing on what every instrument is adding to the general mix rather than trying to show off the players at every opportunity.
The musical rocketship was about to take off into new lands, but A New World Record is the best look at what The Beatles probably were looking for when they teamed up with Lynne. He could create sonic records that sounded perfect on radio, and those beautiful harmonies were practically tailor-made for one of the best bands in the world.
