Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Sun 4 October 2026 19:15, UK
Given how ultimately short-lived the Traveling Wilburys were as a band, they still had to shoulder their fair share of rough times over the course of just a few years.
Bob Dylan became the bane of the rest of their lives, to a certain degree, as his own solo endeavours tended to dictate so much of what they did. When he wasn’t in the studio recording his own material, he was on tour, and when he wasn’t on tour… well, he was nowhere to be found. You could see how this could quickly become a gripe.
However, on December 6th, 1988, that was suddenly the least of their worries. Roy Orbison, who had pined for a new lease of life for so long and finally got it with the supergroup, died from a heart attack. It was an even crueller twist of the knife in what had already been a tumultuous life and career.
It probably didn’t feel like the right time to be thinking about the future, but as Jeff Lynne later said: “We’d become this unit, we were all good pals… We always knew we were going to do another one, and now it’s just the four of us.” Even still, the process of putting the wheels in motion for a new record was going to be more fraught and emotionally heavy than it ever was before.
After taking some time away to figure things out, getting back in the room again was always going to be the hardest part. It wasn’t that the atmosphere was tense or awkward; it was simply that the band had lost an essential cog in their machine, and learning to function again had to be a process involving trial and error.
But slowly, the ideas and their dynamics did start coming back to them, just like old times. Lynne pointed to such an example in the Vol 3 song ‘Inside Out’, where he said: “We came to write the words of that. Somebody like Bob, maybe, I can’t remember if it was Bob or Tom, he just came up with the idea, ‘look out your window, the grass ain’t green’. And then, I just thought of ‘it’s kind of yellow’.”
It was like a cascade of dominoes falling after that, as he continued, “And then somebody else says, ‘see what I mean’. And then we got the next bit, ‘look up your chimney, the sky ain’t blue, it’s kind of yellow’. And then that one became a joke because every time the third line came, it kept being ‘yellow – it’s kind of yellow’.”
Further reading: From The Vault
As if by magic, the Traveling Wilburys were back in motion, but it was testament not just to their loyalty towards one another, as well as their lack of commercial motive, that they never wanted to push things any further than they needed to go. Songs like ‘Inside Out’, amounting to the totality of Vol 3, may have given them a second wind, but then it was time to put the band to bed.
You could argue, in this sense, that the death of Roy Orbison damaged the outlook of the remaining Wilburys irreparably, but this would somewhat do a disservice to their own desires. Ultimately, they knew what they wanted, and although theoretically they could have gone further, they understood that it was time to close the book.
