Credit: Far Out / Jeff Lynne
Wed 26 August 2026 16:45, UK
There aren’t many singers in the rock world who can make their songs sound as naturally perfect as Jeff Lynne could.
Some of the greatest songs of all time were what he had as a measure for what he wanted with ELO, and despite being one of the biggest Beatles fans in the world, there are more than a few songs in his catalogue that could go toe-to-toe with some of the biggest tunes the Fab Four ever made. But that’s because a lot of the lessons that he learned from them were baked into his DNA long before he even started releasing his own music back in the late 1960s.
He was already lucky enough to see the band at work when they laid down tracks for records like The White Album, but Lynne wanted to go further once the band broke up. The Move was a great way for him to refine his talents in a group, but after Roy Wood stepped away from ELO, he knew that he had a vehicle for him to test anything and everything he wanted. And with that open a canvas; it was time for him to try and get absolutely bonkers on everything that he recorded.
Half of their greatest material sounds like he used ‘I Am the Walrus’ as the template for his career, and even when working on the lesser tunes in his catalogue, he always tried to use the studio as an instrument. It even got to the point where some of the biggest tunes of his career couldn’t even be played live, just like The Beatles used to do, but Lynne still figured that nothing could get in the way of a good song as long as it could be played on one instrument and still sound great.
That kind of logic applied to everything that the Traveling Wilburys did when they stripped down all of their tunes, but Lynne seemed to see that supergroup as an opportunity to take his foot off the gas. He didn’t need to be in ELO if he didn’t want to anymore, and even though he had a few great tunes on his first solo album, Armchair Theatre, it took him absolutely ages before he decided that it was time for him to take a crack at something different.
Long Wave still sounded like the version of Lynne everyone knew and loved, but there was a lot more of a retro slant to everything. All of the songs were covers of old pop tunes from the pre-rock and roll age, and while Lynne does a fantastic job at redoing all of those tracks, he didn’t see those records as his favourites at first. He was originally scared to even make the album, but a song like ‘She’ convinced him that he had something there whenever he sang those tunes.
The tune was never going to work being sung with the same affectations as the original, but getting the harmonies in the background made Lynne feel right at home, saying, “This is a version I made on my new album Long Wave. It’s an album of old, classic songs that I find absolutely beautiful and irresistible. So I wanted to do them. And this one’s good. I couldn’t possibly sing it like Charles Aznavour, so I sang it like me, which is in three-part harmony most of the way. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody do it in three-part harmony before.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The album does tend to sound like an ELO-fied version of easy listening music sometimes, but it also doesn’t overstay its welcome either. Standing at less than a half-hour, the whole record feels like something that could have come out of the old days of pop songwriting, only this time with a bit more polish behind the production and Lynne having a far less dramatic approach to the vocals.
He knew that he only needed to have a few vocal affectations to get the job done, and even though he’s already one of the greatest vocalists of his generation, he doesn’t do half bad singing tunes like ‘Beyond the Sea’ or ‘At Last’. Anyone else would have been too scared to take on a project like this, but Lynne reacted to it like a fish in water when he got the right sound for the tunes.
