“A tiny bit difficult”: The album Jeff Lynne was never comfortable working on
There are hardly any producers on this Earth who can make a recording process go as smoothly as Jeff Lynne.
It helps when you’re working with some of the greatest pop songwriters of all time, but even when Lynne was left on his own, he knew what he was going after whenever he made a song and was willing to put on as many layers as he needed to in order for everything to sound right. But even after rubbing elbows with some of the biggest giants of the music industry, there were going to be a few sessions where he would have rather been anywhere else but behind the board.
Then again, when someone has been able to critique the harmonies of the goddamn Beatles, there’s a good chance that they will never have to be scared of anything anymore. Lynne was already a massive Beatles fan as far back as the days of The Move, and getting the chance to record them for the Anthology project would have been enough for anyone to pinch themselves a few times over every single day they went to work.
But it took a lot of time for Lynne to even feel comfortable with what he was doing in ELO. He knew he couldn’t take the massive orchestra on the road and do the songs justice, but even when listening to the biggest pieces of their history, they almost didn’t need to tour. Being able to make ‘Mr Blue Sky’ was proof enough that he was a genius, and anyone remotely interested in music was catching on to his production tricks.
Years before he even worked with Tom Petty, the heartland rocker was already making a handful of tunes that had an ELO-style spin to them whenever he worked on tracks like ‘Change of Heart’. And while George Harrison said that Lynne wrote some of the best pop tunes of all time, it was a massive compliment for anyone to be able to go to work with Brian Wilson when making his solo albums.
Any producer would have been in heaven playing second fiddle to one of the greatest melodists of all time, but you have to remember where Wilson was during this time. Lynne was happy to work with him in any capacity, but seeing him getting pushed around by his abusive therapist definitely brought a lot of melancholy weight to the record before they could even record anything.
It’s bad enough trying to get into a certain headspace in the studio, but when you have a therapist trying their best to keep Wilson’s creativity at bay, it wasn’t like Lynne was breaking any new ground, saying, “It was a tiny bit difficult, yeah, but only because of the way it was structured, with all the doctors and that stuff, and you have to go through this chain of events before you do anything. Like you’d lay down a tape, a little rough thing of a song that I wrote with him, and suddenly someone’s got a copy of it and they’re playing it to the record company saying, Look at this! What’s he trying to do?”
While we’ll never know what it was like to sit in on one of those sessions, it’s not like it sounds like a walk in the park from how Lynne describes it. There should be no limits to what someone can come up with in the studio, so to see one of the greatest songwriters of all time suddenly being dictated by someone dissect his music despite not knowing the first thing about good music, even if it hits them over the head, doesn’t exactly point to any record being an absolute knockout when it comes out.
But even if Lynne had to soldier through some of those fraught sessions, it’s not like Wilson’s genius wasn’t still there on his self-titled debut. The genius side of him hadn’t gone anywhere, but it ended up having a lot of extracurriculars around him, a bit too much for anyone to really notice.
