Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Sat 12 September 2026 2:00, UK
There was never any kind of hierarchy when it came to the members of the Traveling Wilburys.
Every single one of them was trying to make the best songs that they could when they got together, and even when they were all together in one room, it wasn’t that uncommon to toss one of their tunes off to one of their bandmates and see what they could do with it. But even for legends like George Harrison and Bob Dylan together in one band, they still had to make some painful cuts when it came to quality control as well.
Then again, it’s a miracle that the band even managed to make an album of tunes at all. The entire thing needed to be done in a grand total of ten days, and even though ‘Handle With Care’ was the testing grounds to see if everything worked, a lot of the other tunes on the record are the kind of old-school rock and roll tunes that could have been put out by any of them back when they were kids.
Harrison had grown exponentially since the days of skiffle, but it’s not like he doesn’t have some great tunes on here. ‘Heading for the Light’ is one of the catchiest things that he ever released in the 1980s, and that’s before even getting to the showstopping performance that Roy Orbison delivers on every single song he sings. But when looking at the band members, Dylan was always going to be a little bit of a holdout.
It’s not that the folk icon didn’t want to be in the band by any stretch, but you can tell from his body language in the videos that he wasn’t used to this kind of lineup. He had been the leader of his respective groups for his entire career, and being able to simply be another member of the band was going to take some getting used to. It did make for some great content on tunes like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’, but Dylan managed to have some of his tunes fall through the cracks some of the time.
Because when you were in a room with the Wilburys, nobody was safe from criticism. Each of them knew to leave their egos at the door, and while Harrison worshipped the ground that Dylan walked on a lot of the time and even went so far as to candidly film him on the premises every now and again, ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ was the kind of tune that didn’t really fit in with what the band was going for.
Jeff Lynne remembered cutting a demo of the tune with Dylan when they first started tracking the album, but Dylan ended up rolling over and making room for some of the other guys’ songs instead, saying, “[Bob Dylan and I] did a demo once of him singing ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ in his garage. There was a little 24-track in the corner. We did ‘Handle With Care’ there, too.” Granted, Dylan probably wasn’t looking to show the song to the Wilburys specifically when he laid it down.
Further reading: From The Vault
You have to remember that Dylan is the kind of songwriter who never stops writing, and any tune that he ever released was going to come out at exactly the right time. And even if ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ is a decent enough tune, it was probably going to look a bit like familiar territory since Dylan had already written tunes like ‘Dirty World’ and ‘Congratulations’ for the same album, both of which dealt with being unlucky in love.
While the song is the only thing we will ever have to a pure collaboration between Lynne and Dylan, it’s not like the voice of a generation wanted that sheen on everything he touched. He was only a few years out from Time Out of Mind, and that meant doing a complete overhaul to pave the way for something new.
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