A Conversation with Jeff Lynne – HuffPost 10.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Hiya, Jeff, how are you?

Jeff Lynne: Oh, not too bad, and how are you?

MR: I’m pretty good, pretty good. Hey, it looks like you’ve got a couple of projects, your solo album Long Wave, and also The Very Best Of Electric Light Orchestra.

JL: Uh-huh.

MR: Where do you find the time in the day?

JL: Well, don’t forget, that’s all I had to do. I spent three years six days a week doing those two albums plus another eight songs for my new album, original songs.

MR: Let’s first get into Long Wave. Long Wave is a bit of a tribute to your musical history. Things you loved?

JL: Yeah, things I loved, that I’ve loved since I was a tiny lad.

MR: Your track list includes older classics, such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Smile,” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” But there are also tracks such as “Let It Rock” and “She.”

JL: What can I say? I’ve got a very diversified taste. Part of it was, obviously, that I’d grown up through the rock ‘n’ roll era, and so that’s why they’re in there, because they were very formative in my rock ‘n’ roll years.

MR: It must have been hard for you to come up with a track list for this one. How did you choose them?

JL: It wasn’t difficult, they sort of jumped at me when I wrote them down, a few of them. I’ve been thinking about doing this for years, but I never actually got around to it because they sounded so complicated to do. I never even tried them before. I actually listened to the records, probably a hundred times, each song, just to get into it in such a deep way. I really wanted to do them perfectly. There wasn’t a musical mistake anywhere, and there isn’t, so I’m really glad to say that.

MR: I imagine some of these songs were favorites of your parents, maybe playing in the house when you were little?

JL: That’s right. We didn’t have a TV ’til I was about thirteen. That’s when Roy Orbison and Del Shannon came along, so, okay, I was safe. That’s what I did. I listened to them, and I also had a crystal set in bed, you know? I would listen to all that stuff, because the BBC was on long wave and that’s all you could get in those days.

MR: Thus the title for Long Wave. You’ve been part of ELO, The Traveling Wilburys, The Move, and you’ve been associated with many more. You’re constantly in musical motion, aren’t you?

JL: Well, I like to be. Music is my first love. I have so much fun doing it, especially doing these old, beautiful songs where not only is the tune great, but the chords are marvelous and the words are superb. It’s just so rare that you get all three things spot on. This is why they sort of jumped off the page for me, you know? Sometimes, I would trawl through iTunes to try and find different versions of it, so I could do…what do you call it?

MR: An amalgam?

JL: Yes, exactly. Very well spotted.

MR: Thank you.

JL: Yes, an amalgam of different styles of that song rather than get trapped. What I really did was discard the arrangements from them and make my own arrangements so that they sounded like my style, more like harmony and no flutes and clarinets and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to make it a little bit more rock ‘n’ roll or kind of a bit more sixties, I suppose, rather than fifties.

MR: It was Jeff Lynne-ized.

JL: I hope so, yeah.

MR: When you have a project like this, is it tempting to go on the road and tour with nothing but this kind of material?

JL: Nothing’s ever tempted me to go on the road yet.

MR: [laughs] Perhaps you’ll want to return to material like this again for another project?

JL: You never know. If somebody wants me, maybe I’ll do a show, but we’ll see. I’ve just done a documentary, really. It’s like an hour and a half long and it tells you the whole story of me and ELO and all the people I’ve worked with. There are interviews from all the people I’ve worked with and produced. It’s quite fun, it’s really good. We had a screening of it at the Grammy museum and it went down really well. I was really pleased.

MR: Looking back at your career from the early days until now, are you surprised at the amount of achievement you’ve had to this point?

JL: Well, when you’re doing it yourself, you don’t notice it. It’s when people tell you about it, when it’s written down or, obviously, the documentary, then I do see all the achievements. I don’t gloat over it. I’m very thankful.

MR: Speaking of your achievements, they include big ELO hits such as “Telephone Line,” “Living Thing,” “Evil Woman,” “Don’t Bring Me Down,” and more, such as “Do Ya” with The Move. Looking at that body of work, you’ve created a lot of anthems.

JL: Oh, that’s very sweet, thank you.

MR: Yeah, the way that people have used personalized some of these songs over the years goes beyond just having an enduring pleasant song.

JL: Yeah, they’ve gone further than I ever imagined. When I first wrote those songs, all I was hoping for was that they’d get on the charts; “Ooh, maybe they’d get in the Top Ten. That would be great!” As a songwriter, that’s what you’re sort of aiming for, because you want people to hear them. But when they’re still sticking around after forty years, it’s really quite amazing, and then I do become amazed by it.

MR: Now, in a group like ELO, you are participating with other band members in coming up with some of the arrangements, et cetera, right?

JL: Yeah.

MR: But on your new solo album, Long Wave, you play every instrument.

JL: Yes, I love to play drums and bass and guitar and piano. Those are the main instruments I play. That is it. I’ve always loved to. On some old ELO stuff, I’m playing bass on a couple of albums, so it’s not like it’s something brand new. I have done bits and pieces of it, it’s just that now, I’ve had so much more experience as a producer. I’ve had like thirty years more experience than those songs, and I’ve been working with lots and lots of great people. I’ve actually learned a lot more than I knew when I recorded those ELO songs, and that is really why I wanted to redo them. I listened to them on the radio and I go, “I dunno, it’s a bit wooly, that. It’s wooly sounding. There’s no clarity, and that’s what I was looking for.” So I went into my studio and I started on “Mister Blue Sky.” I finished it as this brand new version and I played it for my manager Craig and he said, “Wow, that’s fantastic, it’s much better. Why don’t you try some more,” and so I did. I tried “Evil Woman” and “Strange Magic” and they came out really good, too–bright and full with nice punchy bottom end. I’m very, very pleased with them and I’m really glad that I did it because now they exist in the world in a much better form than they were before.

MR: And you have the new song, “Point of No Return.”

JL: Yeah. That song’s about five years old, actually.

MR: When you looked at the ELO body of work and chose the twelve for this project, was it hard to stop?

JL: It was, actually. I actually got enough for two volumes, so it’s quite amazing that I couldn’t stop at that point. Also, my manager always wanted bonus tracks, that seems to be the new game. “Oh yeah, you finished it, but where’s the bonus tracks?” “Ah.”

MR: That’s right, you need one for iTunes, one for Amazon, one for Wal-Mart…

JL: Yeah, you’ve got to have loads of these bonus tracks. It’s just odd. It didn’t used to be like that, of course.

MR: With Long Wave, you have these eleven songs. I would love a childhood memory or two–sweet, bittersweet–associated with these songs.

JL: I was sitting in the living room and my mum and my auntie was there listening to the radio. Well, they were talking, basically, but the radio was on, and “Only The Lonely” by Roy Orbison came on and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was like, “What the…?” My mum and my auntie said, “Ooh, that’s horrible. It’s too sexy,” so that’s a funny thing. I was only thirteen at the time, but I thought, “That’s the most marvelous thing I’ve ever heard,” and I told them so. They said, “Ooh, don’t be silly, that’s too sexy,” whatever that means. I just remember that happening and that “Only The Lonely” opened my eyes to what actually was going on and I thought, “Who told everybody what to do on these records? How do they know what to play? Who tells them? Who does such-and-such?” One great story I heard about that session–well, all his sessions–was Roy Orbison used to sing behind the coat rack in the studio because they hadn’t got any baffles in those days. That’s the most hilarious picture in my mind, of this most wonderful singer ever, stuck behind this coat rack all muffled and that. You couldn’t hear the instruments into the mic if he couldn’t hear his mic in the instruments.

MR: What’s amazing is you have no hint of that because of the amount of reverb on his voice.

JL: Yeah, reverb and echo. There’d be reverb and a slap of feeding back a little bit. It’s like Fred Foster used to say of him, “It’s like putting icing on a cake for him.” If you’ve got a beautiful voice you can do it, if you haven’t got a great voice, echo doesn’t actually work sometimes.

MR: And it isn’t like you’re using it to hide anything.

JL: That’s right. You can hide a little bit, but at the end of the day, if you don’t sing in tune, then echo will make that twice as bad because it lingers on twice as long.

MR: [laughs] That’s right, good point. There was no major pitch correction going on in those days.

JL: No, none at all. But he didn’t need it, he was such a beautiful singer. On some of the other songs, there’s always a story. Like you’re sitting there, I could be in bed listening on my crystal set, for instance, on the long wave–it’s always long wave, that’s where everything came from off the BBC. I’ve got memories of that, hearing songs for the first time in bed and going, “Wow, what a great thing.”

MR: A lot of fifties kids in the United States went to bed with their radios on, including me. Yeah.

JL: Yeah, with the headphones.

MR: When you were thirteen and thinking how sexy Roy Orbison was, [laughs] was that the point where you decided you wanted to be doing this?

JL: Oh, definitely. I think from the age of thirteen, I really wanted to be a producer and I’ve always thought that the producer was the top of the tree. I always went, “Oh, he’s a producer,” people like George Martin and that. I think, “Wow, you’ve got to learn so much of that,” and you really do, actually. When I first started out, I didn’t know much at all and I didn’t realize I didn’t but I just thought I could do it without even being taught, but what it was I’ve learned over the years is it’s happened by teaching myself–learning from my mistakes and all things like that. Now I’ve been doing it for this many years–forty-five years or whatever–record producing and songwriting and stuff. It’s like, “Wow, that’s a long time to be doing it,” longer than my dad was working for Birmingham Corporation, which is unbelievable. He retired.

MR: It’s interesting that addition to your arsenal of knowledge and tools for producing, you also can play musical a few instruments.

JL: Yeah, I mean it’s only because I love to play. I started out on the guitar, obviously, and then I taught myself piano from the guitar. I was lucky enough to live in my mum and dad’s house, which had a front room separate. The only trouble with it was that the bus used to go past every five minutes or ten minutes, so all my demos I made on my B&O tape recorder, when you come to listen to them now, there’s always a bus rumbling through the track. It’s really funny. But I did learn how to make records on this little tape recorder called Bang & Olufsen.

MR: Right, Bang & Olufsen. I had a set of B&O speakers that lasted forever.

JL: Oh yeah, they do still make some great stuff. Very innovative and futuristic.

MR: Jeff, let’s talk a little bit about The Traveling Wilburys. Basically, you guys were all pals–Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and George Harrison. What an interesting period. Can you go into how that all came together?

JL: Okay, I’ll tell you how it started. Me and George were making Cloud Nine in George’s studio in England, because he’d asked me to produce it with him. After a few weeks of working on it, we’d always finish at dinner time, and then go back up into the studio and listen back to the work we’d done and make notes for the next day. One night, he said, “You know what? Me and you should have a group.” I said, “Wow, that’s a good idea, who should we have in it?” He said, “Bob Dylan.” I went, “Oh, Bob Dylan, yeah, of course,” and I said, “Well, what about Roy Orbison?” He said, “Yeah, great, Roy Orbison,” and we’d both just gotten to know Tom. Tom was always brilliant, like the All-American Boy, so we asked him as well. Funny enough, everyone we thought of in this group all joined immediately, which was fantastic.

MR: It resulted in this album The Traveling Wilburys, which, considering all the artists and talent that went into it, sounded like one cohesive album.

JL: Yeah, well it was really. We wrote those songs, one song a day, for ten days, and that’s how we got the ten songs. What the fun part was, we’d sit around a big round table, each with an acoustic. Sometimes, one of us would have a twelve-string or two of us would have an acoustic twelve-string and that rhythm track would be five acoustics. Then sometimes we’d double-track that and it’d be ten acoustics on the backing track, which is just the basic rhythm guitar. Then we’d sing the words at night after dinner and we’d take all the tapes back to George’s and just finish it off, really–put on the finishing touches and mix it over at George’s studio. I think that’s why it comes out like that, because it was done in a specific time…really quickly.

MR: Let me ask you a personal question. Obviously, you guys became pals, and you had a few passings. You also worked with Del Shannon when Roy Orbison passed…

JL: …no, he didn’t join, no.

MR: But you did some tracks with him, right?

JL: Tom and myself and Mike Campbell were producing some tracks for Del. That was a separate thing. That was a couple years later.

MR: Yeah, and some of the recordings were released on bootleg as The Traveling Wilburys.

JL: That’s probably what it is, it gets mixed up because people put different labels on them.

MR: And George passed recently. My point is you must miss your buddies.

JL: Oh, of course. Always. I miss both of them, I miss George and Roy. They were both great. We had so much fun and did so much music together.

MR: Yeah, it’s wonderful. Jeff, what advice do you have for new artists?

JL: Uh, stick at it. That’s probably it, really.

MR: Well, that’s the best advice.

JL: Stick at it and don’t give up.

MR: Jeff, thank you so much for talking with us about your new solo record, Long Wave, and Mr. Blue Sky – The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra.

JL: Re-recordings, that’s what you can call it.

MR: Hey, if you were to sit down with a glass of wine and listen to that ELO project top to bottom, what would you think?

JL: I feel very pleased with it. It’s made it sound more alive–more punchy, more present. I’m very, very pleased with it, even without the bottle of wine.

MR: [laughs] Thank you again Jeff, and all the best with your projects and whatever you’ve got coming down the pike.

JL: Cheers, all the best to you, too.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne