The one singer Jeff Lynne immediately fell in love with: “Her voice is amazing”
Jeff Lynne has always been a bit of an old soul when it comes to some of his favourite artists.
He still has his ears open all the time, but when looking through his discography, you can tell that he always goes back to those classic Beatles records that he fell in love with whenever he needs the right inspiration for whatever he’s working on. But every now and again, someone will end up coming out of the woodwork with the kind of sound that no one else has managed to touch on yet.
If you were to look at Lynne’s track record for production, though, he’s not exactly in the same category as someone like Trevor Horn or anything. A lot of his best songs were the ones that he made when working with his contemporaries, and no matter how much he has made classic song after classic song, it made more sense for him to work with someone like Tom Petty than trying to work his same magic on a Lady Gaga recording.
He had his own way of doing things, but a lot of the rock and roll that came out around the 2000s was moving in that direction. Some of the biggest names in music wanted to go back to the classic sound of vintage recording technology, but it was clear that Lynne was going to need more melody behind his hits. He wasn’t going to dive headfirst into a White Stripes recording or anything, but he felt right at home when listening to the singer-songwriters happening at the time.
The first few years of the 21st century were spent working on George Harrison’s Brainwashed, but since one of the former Beatles’ best friends was Norah Jones’s father, he at least had a passing fancy in that kind of music. Jones was one of the finest songwriters out at the time, but compared to her mellow brand of jazzy soft rock, Regina Spektor was working in a completely different field than anyone else.
Other pianists like Fiona Apple and Tori Amos had tried their hand at making more adventurous pop music, but what made Spektor different was how accessible she was. Apple wasn’t afraid to get weird whenever she made a record, but as long as Spektor’s songs had a decent melody, that was all she could hope for, and Lynne couldn’t help seeing a little bit of himself in that kind of philosophy.
It took him a while before he ended up producing her record, but listening to her play on her own, Lynne felt that she was one of the finest musicians working in the modern age, saying, “It’s not an obvious pairing but someone asked me if I wanted to do it and if I’d like to work with her and sent me a couple of her albums. When I heard them I was really blown away with them. She came to my studio and we talked about for a while and she was a lovely girl, very sweet, and her voice is so amazing! So in tune! Beautiful quality and a lovely tone. And a beautiful plumage!”
And while the experiment of him producing a record like Far was certainly interesting, you could tell that Lynne still felt at home making the old-school songs that he was used to. His other production credits around that time, other than his own records, always came back to working with people like Joe Walsh, and it’s not a big secret that he would rather see where his own muse would take him every time he made a new record.
But for the most part, Spektor was there to remind him that there was a lot of great music to be found if everyone was willing to listen just a little bit more. It wasn’t going to be easy to spot it out in the wild, but Lynne was going to do everything he could to make sure that he had the best ears in the business when it came to spotting new talent.
