Introduction

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I try to listen to all of my music every other year (and so far I've been successful in doing so).  While doing this in 2014, I found a similarity between the Electric Light Orchestra's "All Over the World" and Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" - they both have a list of places.  Since ELO have a few other connections to Chuck Berry (they covered his "Roll over Beethoven" and mention him in "Rockaria!"), I thought this was an intentional similarity.

Finding that similarity reminded me that there were a lot of elements in ELO songs that I thought were references to other musicians or to other ELO works but that I'd never actually explored.  In June, I got the box set of all of their albums (I'd been missing four of them), and in listening through them all, I took notes.  I listened through them again in November and found more things.  Because I kept finding things, I didn't think there was much of a chance of writing an exhaustive post about all of the references in their music, so I decided to try something different.

Recently, I've become sort of obsessed with the notion of learning every part to every song by a particular band.  I've been doing this with the Zombies since 2012, and in doing so I've discovered a lot of fascinating things that I'd been completely oblivious to as just a listener.  At the beginning of this year, I started doing the same type of project with the Alan Parsons Project and a few Beach Boys albums.  I considered doing ELO then, but I didn't want to try doing too much at once.  Apparently I'm not good at setting limits for myself because now I am endeavouring to do that project.  I figured that if I've found so much just by listening, there must be a lot more to discover through learning the parts.

The notes I started taking at the beginning of last year now cover a whole page, and after recently listening to all of the albums again (just before starting this project) I added an-other hand-written half-page.  To start off this project, I'm going to go by album and write a more detailed account of what I've found so far, which - along with the references to other musicians - includes other interesting musical/lyrical things.  Then I'm going to start digging into the music (which will probably be slow going at first and which will be limited by my not owning some of the instruments).

There are some things in my notes that I'll have to verify, which might take awhile, but I felt I should get started with my ELO analysis.