The most beautiful pop song Jeff Lynne ever heard
Jeff Lynne was never the kind of musician who cut corners whenever he made one of his records.
There are plenty of singers who go for more of a feeling whenever they are recording their masterpieces, but Lynne was far more interested in making the kinds of songs that were a lot more pristine than anything else they had heard on the radio. But even if he was working on the same template that The Beatles had given him when he first started, he had to call it when he knew he wasn’t going to match up to anything that some of his heroes had done all those years ago.
Then again, anyone even trying to match The Beatles is pretty much dooming themselves to fail to some degree. This is a band that was already known as one of the most beloved bands in the world, and while having the kind of ambition to match what they did is half the reason why Oasis either looked like the most confident or most insufferable rock star that the world had ever seen when they first came out.
But Lynne seemed like one of the few who could actually carry on what his heroes had started. Face the Music and A New World Record didn’t necessarily have the same kind of punch as a lot of those early Beatles songs, but you could tell that he was taking all of the ingredients that made those songs work and putting his own rendition on top of them whenever he started working on tracks like ‘Telephone Line’.
And to be fair, it’s not like Lynne didn’t have firsthand experience watching how the band worked. He had already been invited to see what one of their recording sessions was like when he was still a kid, and getting the chance to produce for George Harrison was a non-stop excuse for him to ask him anything and everything about those old days when they were one of the biggest bands in the world.
But when the Traveling Wilburys were formed, you could barely focus on one legend for too long of a time. Getting Harrison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan in one band was almost too good to fail, but even with a band with that many legends, Lynne was in awe of Roy Orbison. He had one of the greatest voices that anyone had ever heard, but it was the attention to detail in Orbison’s records that struck a nerve with him.
It’s one thing to have songs like ‘Pretty Woman’ under his belt, but Lynne felt ‘Only the Lonely’ was one of the most beautiful songs that he had ever heard, saying, “I think ‘Only The Lonely’ sums up all the beauty you can have, but such simple chords. I used to think all the time, ‘How do they do that?’ When I was little, when I was 13, I would think, ‘Who’s the bloke who goes and puts it all together and makes it into this beautiful thing?’”
And it’s not hard to hear what made Lynne’s heart leap out of his chest when he heard Orbison sing for the first time. The main focus is always on that voice, but listening to the rest of the arrangement around it is as close to pop perfection as the early 1960s ever got, especially with that gentle pulse of the drums and those subtle background harmonies behind him whenever he performed it live.
Orbison was already the epitome of cool with those shades on, but even if he wasn’t one to be trifled with, what Lynne connected with the most was the heart behind all of his greatest songs. Underneath those shades was a man wearing his heart on his sleeve, and it’s no surprise that Lynne would adopt the same look when he started working on his own tunes with ELO.
