(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Sun 18 January 2026 18:15, UK
It didn’t really take a lot of coaxing for someone like Jeff Lynne to join the Traveling Wilburys.
Let’s face it, if anyone had the chance to be in a band with some of the greatest songwriters to ever walk the Earth, there’s a good chance they still would have said yes even if their only job was to play the triangle on one song. This was a dream come true for someone like Lynne, but even with all of the production credentials that he had at his disposal, there were always those subtle problems that could drive him up the wall when working alongside his legendary buddies.
But if anyone had any problems in the band, they were going to have to answer to George Harrison. He was the one who put the group together, and while all of them knew to check their ego at the door when they began working together, it wasn’t going to be easy throwing lines in when working with someone like Bob Dylan. Everyone had to bring their A-game, and it’s not like they were selling themselves short whenever they played.
Their debut record wasn’t meant to be the most serious album in the world, and yet all of the band members got the best out of each other. Harrison got back to writing pop songs on ‘Heading for the Light’, Dylan was up to his usual storyteller tricks on songs like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’, and the best songs on the record are where you can feel them having fun, whether it’s everyone trading off on ‘End of the Line’ or the round-robin lyrics on ‘Dirty World’.
Everything seemed like it would be perfect, but even being just shy of perfection wasn’t going to work when recording Roy Orbison. He had the voice that everyone in the band dreamed of, and even if Dylan and Harrison were awestruck by the singer, Lynne wasn’t looking to settle for a decent tune. His hero needed the respect he deserved, and he very nearly didn’t get it when working on ‘Not Alone Anymore’.
Not that the song is bad by any means; far from it. When looking at the entire track, Orbison’s voice ties everything together, especially when he goes for those high notes at the end of the final chorus. Anyone with functional eardrums knew that this was a winner, but when Lynne first began working on the record, he remembered being unbearably annoyed when the song wasn’t coming together like it should have.
Orbison’s voice was in fine form, but the backing track was completely scrubbed by Lynne after he said it wasn’t good enough, saying, “It was unbelievable, really, because I couldn’t stand the way [it] was, ’cause I knew it was a great tune. It just wasn’t happening, these chords. It was just played like a 12-bar. But the bits I changed, I just had the bass drum and the voice. I took that home to my little studio. So there’s no bass to bother about and there’s no other instruments. And that’s how it came about. It’s the only time I’ve ever actually done it to that extent, like completely changing the internal movements of the song.”
For an album track like this, most people wouldn’t have cared if Lynne went the extra mile. But it wasn’t about making sure that everything was perfect, Orbison had started to get forgotten among the true legends of rock and roll history, and while no one could have known that he would have passed away so soon after the record had finished, Lynne wanted to make sure he got the kind of song that he deserved to put him back on top.
And while Lynne has made fantastic songs on his own and with Harrison, Tom Petty, and even The Beatles, this track should be a good indication of why he’s considered a genius. He started out with less than half of a song, and using only one voice, he managed to put together a pop masterpiece.
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