“We better write another”: The Traveling Wilburys song they initially said wasn’t good enough
Anyone who thought of bringing material to a Traveling Wilburys session knew to bring their A-game. It probably wasn’t the best idea to get something that could potentially be a huge hit, but whenever Roy Orbison or George Harrison are looking at you, it’s normally a good idea to make sure that you don’t have anything cheesy in the backlog to throw at them. But even if they had come up with a tune that had no substance, any of those legends knew how to turn it into something magical.
Then again, the whole process of them getting together was almost by divine intervention. The story of them forming through strange happenstances is almost too lucky to be a coincidence, but given how well they worked alongside each other, it made too much sense for them to make an entire album of tunes rather than stopping after Harrison finished the song ‘Handle With Care’.
They were there to have fun, and you can hear that fun seeping through every second of the band’s debut. Despite only having a few days to get the tracks done, each tune comes off as a breezy song that could have easily been recorded in a rocking chair on a porch, as all of them are strumming away. Some would be funny like ‘Dirty World’, but some might also be heartfelt like ‘End of the Line’.
Any of them could have carried the record on their own, but there was no doubt that Orbison was the one everyone was starstruck by. He was the one with the golden voice out of everyone in the room, and even if he didn’t have the same kind of chops as Harrison or Bob Dylan as a lyricist, he would send every song he sang into the stratosphere, even if it was only for a few seconds on ‘Last Nite’.
So, for someone that integral to the record, how the hell did he wind up with one of the more forgettable songs by everyone’s measure? Orbison could normally wrap his voice around anything with a half-decent melody, but when talking about recording the album, Tom Petty remembered everyone thinking that the song ‘Not Alone Anymore’ didn’t have the same punch as the rest of the record.
“[We thought] ‘We’d better write another song.’ Well, that’s not good enough for Jeff Lynne. The next day he had the lead vocal and the drums and completely rewrote the song.”
Tom Petty
The band were thinking about ditching the entire track, but Jeff Lynne turned it into one of the highlights of the record, saying, “That was Jeff and Roy’s song. No one was really happy with it. [We thought] ‘We’d better write another song.’ Well, that’s not good enough for Jeff Lynne. The next day he had the lead vocal and the drums and completely rewrote the song. And now it’s one of my favourite ones on the album. There’s nobody that can do that.”
Making the most out of Orbison’s vocal may have been arduous, but given where Lynne would go in the next few years, you’d better believe Harrison was paying attention there. The idea of making a new Beatles song out of John Lennon’s tiny demo of ‘Free As A Bird’ would have been impossible, but if Lynne could work magic with Orbison’s voice, he could certainly do the same thing for a Beatle.
But the most important part about ‘Not Alone Anymore’ is that it gave Orbison one full song of his own to serve as the album’s connective tissue. Most people were already feeling a bit burnt out on the band by their second album, but the real reason why Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 wasn’t received warmly is probably because there wasn’t that crooning voice soaring above them anymore.
