My Top 1000 Songs #986: Telephone Line

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Electric Light Orchestra were one of the bands commencing a massive commercial run just as I started getting into pop music as a 9-year-old kid. "Evil Woman" was in constant rotation when I first grew obsessed with Top 40 radio in 1975, and their string of mid-70s hits were as omnipresent in my early AM years as Sweet and Queen and Kiss. So, naturally, I mostly left them behind once I moved into the broader classic rock world and on into prog and punk and indie rock and everything else that followed.

They seem to have undergone a bit of a critical reassessment (note some of the stellar cover versions below!), a lot of folks in the power pop world setting aside the band's mainstream baggage and appreciating Jeff Lynne's Beatlesque baroque pop production chops. Me, I haven't quite come back into the fold, but I remain a sucker for "Telephone Line," off 1976's A New World Record. It kinda bridges prog and pop, dense but relentlessly catchy, and the chorus, a multi-layered 50s'-styled doo-wop with  a wall of harmonies, has been playing in my head for nearly half a century.

Live 2017:

Juliana Hatfield, from her recent run of tribute albums:

Solo acoustic from power pop dude Parthenon Huxley (aka P.Hux):

90s San Francisco indie rockers J Church: