Readers of a certain age may remember shoving a tape into the 8-track player mounted beneath their dash and listening to Evil Woman, Mr. Blue Sky, Strange Magic and other tunes by the Electric Light Orchestra.
That band’s leader, Jeff Lynne, has just released a new solo album entitled Long Wave– a collection of “pre-rock standards”.
From Lynne’s website:
I call this new album Long Wave because all of the songs I sing on it are the ones heard on long wave radio when I was a kid growing up in Birmingham, England.
These songs take me back to that feeling of freedom in those days and summon up the feeling of first hearing those powerful waves of music coming in on my old crystal set.
My dad also had the radio on all the time, so some of these songs have been stuck in my head for 50 years. You can only imagine how great it felt to finally get them out of my head after all these years.
I guess we now know what ELO was referring to in their hit, Can’t Get It Out of my Head…
The new album is unique in that Lynne is playing all the instruments himself which were later dubbed together to create each song.
Snippets of the songs on the new album can be heard here.
Personally, I’ll stick with the old ELO.
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