Jeff Lynne Not Happy With Original ELO Tracks

Jeff Lynne has re-recorded 11 Electric Light Orchestra tracks, including anthem Mr Blue Sky, because he wasn’t happy with the originals.

The result is Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of ELO, featuring no input from any other musician. Lynne admits the project came about because he kept getting upset when he heard the lead track on radio.

He tells Billboard: “I used to listen and go, ‘Wow, that’s not quite how I meant it.’ I really wanted to see if I could get it better. I tried Mr Blue Sky to see what it would be like to make it into a brand-new record, and I enjoyed the results so much that I tried another one, and another one.

“I decided I would do the whole lot – make an album’s worth of them, just so people could hear them in a different way. Probably the way I intended them to be heard in the first place.”

Asked what was wrong with the originals, Lynne says: “They just weren’t tight enough. And some of the sounds on there, like some of the guitar sounds, didn’t sound as good as they could. Some of the piano parts were too dry. A lot of technical stuff.

“It wasn’t the performance – it was maybe my lack of knowledge as a producer. I didn’t really understand the things I was doing.

“You start making up a song and you tell somebody you’re the producer, and you get away with it, basically. But you don’t really learn what you’re doing until later on. I’ve had another 30 years’ practice since then. Now I know enough to actually know what I’m talking about.”

Lynne, whose last solo album was 1990′s Armchair Theatre, will release Mr Blue Sky on October 9, including brand-new track Point of No Return. His covers album Long Wave, made up of tracks he used to listen to on the radio as a child, is released on the same day.