Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Thu 1 October 2026 19:30, UK
There aren’t many undiscovered gems when it comes to the Traveling Wilburys.
It would have been impossible for anyone to ignore what the five legends of rock were doing every single time they got together to play, and even though they didn’t get together nearly as often as many fans wanted them to, it always had to be for the right reasons whenever they picked up their guitars. All of them still wanted to have fun whenever they played, but there were always a handful of tunes that were bound to fall through the cracks whenever they made their albums.
As much as everyone would have wanted to have the lead single, there’s a reason why a song like ‘Handle With Care’ is considered one of their best songs. It’s a mix of every member contributing just the right amount to the tune, and while George Harrison didn’t envision the song being the start of any major band, he was overjoyed getting the chance to work with someone like Roy Orbison or Bob Dylan whenever he started strumming away on tunes like ‘End of the Line’.
But the death of Orbison already cast a dark shadow on the band before they could really get going. Their entire first album was already in the can, but by the time that they showed his empty rocking chair singing his part in the video for ‘End of the Line’, it did seem a lot more morbid to watch all of them singing about how they were now old and grey after spending years in the limelight.
Then again, Orbison’s death didn’t mean the band had to stop, and their second album actually had a lot more going for it than most people realised. The whole thing is closer to garage rock than anything they had made before, and listening to Gary Moore deliver those sweeping solos on ‘She’s My Baby’ was a breath of fresh air coming off of their last record. But for an album that already had a sour feeling behind it, not all the songs deserved to be written off, either.
If anything, Harrison was a lot more defensive of the album than anything else. He felt that the tunes were a lot stronger after the band had been working together for a while longer, and even Dylan seemed to be in high spirits for the first time in a while whenever he talked about everyone’s contributions to the record. But for all the fun to be had on tunes like ‘Wilbury Twist’, ‘Poor House’ became the kind of song that was designed to be ignored.
But for Tom Petty, there was no reason for anyone to discount the song just because it didn’t happen to be a single, saying, “There was an obscure one Jeff and I did called ‘Poor House’ on the second record. That was one I wrote about ten minutes after the session had ended and everyone was leaving. The engineer, Richard Dodd, was like, ‘Hey, everybody wait; we’re gonna do this really quick.’ We laid the track down, and Jeff and I did it all in two-part harmony together on one mic, which people don’t do much anymore.”
“At that time, we sang together quite a bit, and we had gotten pretty good at harmonies.”
Tom Petty
Further reading: From The Vault
And you can really feel that sense of excitement as Petty and Lynne are singing together. The whole thing feels like a more uptempo rocker that the Everly Brothers might have played back in the day, and that’s before even getting into the slower songs on the record that have the same feel as ‘You Took My Breath Away’.
This kind of retro rock and roll sound may not have been everyone’s favourite style of music at the time or anything, but the fact that the band could still sound this good years after their prime was a testament to what they could do together.
They never wanted to become stale, and getting the chance to work with their friends in a band was half the reason why the records sound the way they do. Because if the band is having fun, it’s not that hard to translate that onto the tape.
