(Credit: Wikimedia)
Tue 26 August 2025 19:45, UK
Every supergroup needs to make sure to get every member’s talents accounted for whenever they make a song. Even though everyone comes in among friends when working on a project like The Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison knew that it was bound to be hard work if it meant that every single member got their chance to shine.
Because if you look at the supergroup’s debut record, it sounds like it would have been a nightmare had they all had egos. Balancing five different musical legends over the course of one record was bound to be a nightmare, but since the entire band saw it as a labour of love, the whole thing looked easy when they were putting together tracks like ‘Handle With Care’ or having fun doing the background vocals on ‘Dirty World’.
Although the band were being influenced by outside forces like Bruce Springsteen, it was much easier for them to work off each other half the time. According to Tom Petty, the whole premise of the band was for anyone to throw a line out and see how the rest of them responded, and if it happened to get a thumbs-up, it made it onto the record, which probably explains why there’s so much round-robin singing as well.
It was clear that no one else could have sung ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ but Dylan, and even if Jeff Lynne does a fantastic job at singing the backing vocals on most of the tracks, the real highlight comes when Harrison gets behind the microphone to sing ‘Heading for the Light’. But none of the band members could even pretend to hold a candle to what Roy Orbison was doing.
Orbison may have faded from the public eye compared to everyone else, but if ‘You Got It’ was any indication, he at least knew how to craft a melody the same way he used to do back in the day. Once they got everyone together in a room, though, Harrison remembered hitting a few stumbling blocks before Orbison even sang a note.
He worked fabulously on the break in ‘Handle With Care’, but Harrison remembered struggling for ages before landing on the song ‘Not Alone Anymore’, saying, “The main thing about all of Roy’s big hits, going back to the sixties, is that they were great tunes, they had great hooks and Roy always seemed to have these extra little bits to the song. The structure was always quite different to other people’s tunes. So it was hard to get a song for Roy.”
If there was one person that understood Orbison’s voice, though, it was going to be Lynne. He had studied all of his classic hits, and since Harrison wasn’t there to oversee ‘You Got It’ in the pre-Wilburys days, he knew it was better to hand things off to Lynne to finish up rather than worry about the kind of song he had to offer him.
And when comparing ELO’s greatest work to ‘Not Alone Anymore’, Lynne seemed to be firmly in his wheelhouse when working with the rock and roll godfather. Most people only needed to hear a few bars of Orbison’s voice to fall in love with his timbre, but given how many hooks Lynne could cram into one song, the whole idea of making a great vehicle for him could be written in no time.
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