Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Sat 29 August 2026 20:30, UK
The Traveling Wilburys didn’t want to bring any of their egos into the picture whenever they wrote one of their songs.
The entire point of the band was to have fun, and that meant dividing everything up so everyone had a shot at getting one of their tunes on their debut record. The whole thing was seamless to work on throughout every single day of work, but Jeff Lynne was the true MVP of the sessions that no one seems to acknowledge when bringing up the band’s greatest moments.
To be fair to the casual fans, it’s probably hard to focus on anything else when you have people like Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Bob Dylan all in the same band together at one time. Anyone else was bound to get overshadowed, and it’s not like Lynne was someone who wanted to embrace the spotlight every single time he stepped up to the microphone to sing one of his songs, to begin with.
He had great chops as a singer and a songwriter, but he had grown a bit more comfortable in the producer’s chair most of the time. Anything that he was working on needed to have a bit more bite to it whenever he was working on it, and he was the one sweetening up every single one of the Wilburys’ best tunes with that little dash of musical colour to make everything sound beautiful.
The band even considered ditching one of the greatest Roy Orbison tunes in their catalogue, ‘Not Alone Any More,’ but by just changing the chord sequence a little bit and adding his backing vocals, Lynne worked a miracle and reminded everyone what the 1950s crooner could do. But he spent so much time working on everyone else’s songs that he didn’t really bother having too many lead vocal spots of his own half the time.
He would occasionally have a moment where he would be the co-lead vocalist on a track, but when you’re in a band with a member of the Beatles and Roy Orbison, it’s usually easier to hang back and let them do the heavy lifting in the vocal department. But as they were coming down to the wire when getting everyone on the record, ‘Rattled’ was the kind of song that Lynne could have sung with his eyes closed.
The entire premise of the album was a flashback to the days of playing old-school rock and roll, and no one else was going to stand in his way from singing this tune, saying, “Yeah, well, we all wrote [Rattled], but I hadn’t got a song yet. This was about the fourth or fifth one we did and I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta sing one otherwise I’ll go home and get something to eat.’ [Laughs] Anyway, I’ll send one up when I was singing it. Anyway, so it didn’t matter. The singing start is sort of the rock ‘n’ roll voice that I do sometimes on my other records.”
Further reading: From The Vault
That rock and roll voice in question is also one of the reasons why people love Lynne’s heavier tunes. You couldn’t describe many ELO songs as the heaviest things in the world, but the reason why he’s considered a great rock songwriter comes from tunes like ‘Rockaria’, and getting the chance to channel his inner rockabilly singer was all that the fans could have asked for from this kind of throwback tune.
And the fact that it only has a few moving parts was all a part of the Wilburys’ mentality. They were still some of the greatest in their field every time they played, but when looking at the songs they were playing together, they clearly weren’t sweating the whole thing. It was all about having fun, and nothing gave them a greater rush than playing the music that they brought up.
