6/5/2023 0 Comments Electric light orchestra time![]() ![]() ![]() When we first started making albums, we never thought about what song is going to be a single. "That's the trouble, you get success and you want more. "We tended to look at the charts a lot," Bevan told the Moscow Times in 1994. The mammoth resulting tour only exacerbated things. ELO were emerging as something of a hit-song factory – the million-selling Out of the Blue matched A New World Record by again producing three Top 40 songs – and he became concerned that commerce might be overtaking the art. Whatever their relative value to the project, these moments actually balanced out a growing worry from co-founding drummer Bev Bevan. The only-in-the-'70s "Concerto for a Rainy Day," for instance, included a staccato burst of strings that actually spelled out Morse code for "ELO." (Just when you think this 19-minute, four-song ride might be over, Lynne exclaims, " Here it comes again!" on the terrific "Summer and Lightning.") Ultimately, Out of the Blue loses considerable steam through the too art-rockish "The Whale," before stalling out completely for a spaghetti-western side road called "Wild West Hero." Unfortunately, this tendency toward overthinking could end up becoming too cute by at least half. Watch Electric Light Orchestra Perform 'Mr. I'll think of something daft to put in there.'" I'd go, 'Well, maybe this is going on too long. I often used to put a funny little piece in a song, just in case I get bored with it. I just felt like it needed something simple in the middle of the song. "There's a part in the middle where I talk super fast. It's just so primary and simple, but yet very evocative," Lynne told Rolling Stone. "'Turn to Stone' is one of my favorites I ever did. Its high points – the hits "Turn to Stone" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman," in particular – were dizzyingly high, but its excesses were so emblematic of an indulgent era as to be definitive. He eventually emerged with something sonically similar to its predecessor, but Out of the Blue doesn't have the same tightly wound construction. Rain storms broke up a friendly game of soccer outside Munich's Musicland Studios where ELO were recording Out of the Blue that sparked the rest of "Concerto for a Rainy Day," which took up all of the Side Three. "Starlight" was likewise celestially inspired, this time by the nighttime canopy over the mountains. I didn't see any countryside for the first four days or so, and then everything cleared and there was this enormous view forever and the sky was blue." I was at a chalet in the mountains of Switzerland and it was all misty and cloudy all the way around. "I suppose this is my most well-known song," Lynne told Rolling Stone in 2016. ![]() When the sun finally returned, so did his muse – and "Mr. Initially, a gloomy dampness descended near Lake Geneva, and Lynne struggled to create the album. "It was a time of total music for me," Lynne said in Electric Light Orchestra: Before and After, "and once I got rolling, the songs just kept on coming." Oddly enough, its beginnings were decidedly small-scale: Lynne composed Out of the Blue in a remote chalet in the Swiss alps, where – after an early struggle with writer's block – everyday life tended to spark sweeping new creative ideas. ![]()
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