By Aaron Cruz

Last year, in  2021, TIME by Electric Light Orchestra (Now Jeff Lynne’s ELO) turned 40 years old. TIME is a fantastic record that delivers greatly in terms of narrative, lyricism, theming, and sound, and it does so in a way that remains comfortably fun throughout its runtime.

Live review: Electric Light Orchestra – Blue sky in great voice, express.co.uk, 2016

The album begins with Prologue, an eerie introduction to the synthesized rock sound of TIME. This sound is not representative of what the future of music would be, but it represents a future, one seen in the mind of ELO leader Jeff Lynne, or perhaps in the mind of the main character. The ambiguity of whether or not the events of TIME are a dream in the mind of the lead (who, following the book based on the album, I will call Jeff) permeates every corner of the album. When asked if the events of the album were a dream, Lynne himself claimed, “This is what I’d like to know, because it’s baffled me since I wrote it, if he has actually gone [to the future], or if he’s just thinking about it. … It could be real, or it could be a dream… I’m not sure. I’d rather not say, because I don’t know either. I’m supposed to, but I don’t.” As such, not only does it become a reflection on change in the frame of a warning for the future, it also delivers a message regarding the dilemma of daydreaming. The sound is not only tight and synthesized but spacious and hazy— it represents both the shape of a fictional future and the shape of the mind that created the fiction. Likewise, the album’s lyrical content fits between both of these themes, within the future and the mindscape.

The following Twilight is a bombastic introduction to the album’s sound and a brilliant description to kick off TIME’s story. This track is about moving from the 1980s to the future, be it real or a dream. Even the character himself, who presumably sings Twilight, is unsure: “Am I awake or do I dream; the strangest pictures I have seen?” The contradictory lyrical stylings and the quick movement of the track do well to represent this movement. In addition, Twilight presents the dilemma of being trapped in the future with its chorus refrain, “Twilight; I only meant to stay awhile. Twilight; I gave you time to steal my mind away from me.” Either the character cannot bring himself away from this dream world he has constructed, or the time travel device he has used cannot take him back. The vagueness of whether or not the story of TIME is a dream allows the reader to listen in two different ways, one which is a quiet reflection on a lost love, and another which is a bombastic adventure through the world of the future. Mentions of “shades of time” illustrate visuals of time folding in on itself. These moments of strong imagery make TIME feel like a musical without a visual, forcing the listener to conjure their image of the future, giving them a solid attachment to the main character, whom they can now see. These elements represent a bridge between the past and future, the real and imagined, the known and unknown. As the song puts it, it is a place between what “now is day and once was night.” Twilight.

The future is a common element of fiction. It represents a place that carries the same weight and features the same creatures as our own but is different in many different ways that a viewer cannot know or see. Rather than a world of pure fantasy, the future is both comfortable and uncomfortable to see. Jeff carries this sentiment as he, like the listener, is placed into a world that he cannot comprehend, and as such, his thoughts have a strong focus on the strangest parts of the world around him. Yours Truly, 2095, is the first of a suite of songs that display parts of TIME’s world that differ the most from our own. Mainly, this track focuses on the android robots which have replaced human love in the future, symbolizing a move to the synthetic over the organic. Unlike the future humans, the main character is disappointed with his android, as he compares her to his true love, Julie, back on earth. The song describes a series of strange add-ons carried by the robot. For example, “She has an IQ of 1001; She has a jumpsuit on; And she’s also a telephone.” Of course, this is an imagined 2095 from the mind of someone living in the 1980s, and some lines have been rendered absurd by time (the scientific construct, not the album) accordingly. For example, “I drive the very latest hovercar. I don’t know where you are. But I miss you so much ’til then. I met someone who looks a lot like you. She does the things you do. But she is an IBM.” Still, the song does a great job of showing the listener the world of TIME and its advantages and disadvantages.

After being mortified by the wild, unnatural nature of the future, the lead feels the need to go somewhere more peaceful. “Ticket to the Moon” is a somber contemplation on what Jeff has seen. The idea of taking a ticket to the moon remains, even 40 years later, a twinkle in the eye of the human race. The song represents the immense change in perspective on space travel by juxtaposing samples of the Apollo 11 mission with voice clips of a woman presumably announcing the launch of a commercial spacecraft. In this world, space travel has gone from an incredible, earth-shattering event to something that one can purchase a ticket for on a whim. The future, as shown in this album, and as seen in the world, is filled with convineinces taken for granted. This song is filled with vivid imagery of a man “Flying high above, soaring madly through the mysteries that come.” More fascinating are the lines about how he misses his past lover: “The tears I cry might turn into the rain that gently falls upon your window. You’ll never know.” Musically, “Ticket to the Moon,” is a strong ballad. The droning vocal harmonies in the chorus repeating “Ticket to the Moon,” are simultaneously catchy and breathtaking. In a band famous for beautiful vocal harmony, this is one of their best. Jeff Lynne delivers one of his most excellent vocal performances ever, infusing the lead with emotion and genuinely bringing him to life. Lynne’s ability to illustrate the world of TIME through music is incredible and remains throughout the album.

After introducing the future, Lynne addresses the issues with the world directly, with the song, The Way Life’s Meant to Be. Here, our lead returns to the street he once inhabited in the 1980s and finds it wrecked and destroyed. A world he once took for granted has morphed into something terrible he no longer recognizes. This comparison between the old and the new is a mental departure from the future back into the natural world the character knows as home. This change is represented in the song’s sound, which largely ditches the synthetic elements and moves to a more natural sound, more in accordance with ELO’s earlier work. Thematically, the song follows the character wondering if the future world is beneficial; if the world humanity has constructed for itself is an improvement on what it once was. This theme connects to the haunting repetition of the phrase “Is that what you want?” in Yours Truly, 2095 earlier in the album. The poor construction of this fictional future is another theme that spreads throughout the album, particularly in Yours Truly, 2095, The Way Life’s Meant to Be, and, later on, Rain is Falling.

Much of TIME is seemingly juvenile by modern standards. The idea that a robot woman in the future would have a telephone built-in or that she would be constructed by IBM is, to us, absurd. However, looking at it within the context of the album and analyzing it apart from its absurdity reveals what Lynne was trying to get at with the album. Humanity’s overcomplication of new technology is ultimately detrimental to their eventual happiness, as represented by the useless attachments to the android. Another seemingly poor choice by Lynne is the character’s central conflict: his lost love. Lynne wrote a fantastic story about a man who has traveled to the future, witnessing the blossoming of some of the most fantastical ideas ever put to words, and the conflict in the album is that the main character has “lost his girl.” However, digging deeper, one can see that the girl represents the more significant idea of the original world— the old world before the change or the real world versus the imagined one— a comfort separated from Jeff. “Another Heart Breaks” addresses how the character feels about this displacement. His newfound life is oppressive, depressive, and repetitive. Similarly, the song uses droning synths to represent the encumbrance of depression and repeats the phrase Another Heart Breaks to address his struggle. Though it drags on longer than it should and is easy to skip on repeat listens, it all represents the feeling of depression held by the lead at this point in the story.At the emotional low point of the story of TIME,  Lynne finds no way to connect with the world he once lived in. The story of the album is long and dense, and is impossible to fully cover in just one article. Check in next article to see the second half of the review.