The most well-written song of Jeff Lynne’s entire career: “I’m really, really pleased”
Making a pop song wasn’t about having fun in the studio every time Jeff Lynne got behind the board.
If everything was going smoothly, there was no sense in worrying about how the song was going to turn out, but getting people to sing along to tunes that only had a few simple chords is a lot harder than it looks when someone reaches the top of the charts. It’s all about finding that right melody to tie everything together, and Lynne has harnessed bits of musical magic more than a few times ever since forming Electric Light Orchestra.
That said, it’s not like Lynne didn’t have years of practice before becoming one of the biggest artists in the world. The Move had already given him a breeding ground to make some of the greatest tunes that he could, and when he was still learning the ropes in his teens, the fact that he was there in Abbey Road Studios getting a brief glimpse into The Beatles’ recording process is something that he never took for granted.
And while many people say that Lynne tried to finish what the Fab Four started, a lot of his music is a lot different from what they had done. There are certain orchestral lines that feel a bit nonsensical, like ‘I Am the Walrus’, but there are also tunes that are absolutely pristine from the moment they begin. Their space-age stage setup was only for show, but songs like ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ did feel like it was descended from the heavens whenever they began playing it live.
Once they started to reach their golden period in the mid-1970s, though, every one of their hits would have been enough for any band’s career. There are still songwriters to this day that would kill to write a song like ‘Telephone Line’ or ‘Do Ya’, but Lynne’s strength was always in taking these small concepts that everyone starts out with and rearranging them to sound fresh and exciting again.
That’s what caught the attention of people like George Harrison, but that’s not to say that every one of Lynne’s works was outright terrible by any stretch. He had already started to fall out of love with the concept of the band after Out of the Blue, but when he started working on the music for Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu, there were more than a few fans who were a little bit underwhelmed by what they heard.
Despite Xanadu gaining a reputation as one of those iconic guilty pleasure movies, it’s not like Lynne didn’t come correct when he started writing the music. In fact, most of the songs would have sounded great had they been a part of one of his solo records or even on an ELO project, and even if there was another voice singing his words, Lynne was still proud to have brought the title track to life.
The whole thing was supposed to be otherworldly, and when looking back on the tune a decade later, Lynne still considered it one of the high points of his career, saying, “It was quite difficult because it was the theme tune of the song… um… of the film. And that was quite hard to write. I think construction wise, that’s one of me best songs. I know it’s a bit soft, probably, but it… it’s actually… the chord structure, I’m really, really pleased with. I’ve always liked the chord sequences.”
And if you know anything about Lynne’s track record, the chords are where everything starts. ‘Living Thing’ might seem fairly simple on the surface, but the fact that he could take off into new directions and throw in the odd chord that was outside of the key and make it work is what makes so many of his songs feel like they’re coming from another world whenever he performs them live.
It took a long time for him to get to that point, but since he would soon be working with the Traveling Wilburys after working on Xanadu, it’s not like the bad press made a dent in his track record. He was still making fantastic pop songs, and even if the public didn’t get it at the time, Lynne was content knowing that he had arranged some of his tunes to be as perfect as they possibly could.
