Various Artist - Lynne Me Your Ears – A Tribute To The Music Of Jeff Lynne (2001)

A good collection featuring a few revered posters, a couple of actual stars and a buttload of Jeff Lynne’s pop classics and re-writes. The overall feel of this 2CD set is amazingly consistent, which is a feat in itself, as a majority of these artists take a faithfully reverent swing at highlights in Lynne’s catalog. And, since modern keyboards can mimic The Move’s and EL’s Orchestra these days, many of these offerings take advantage and end up sounding, in a way, like alternate ELOs. So much so, that when a left field rendition saunters by – like Carl Wayne’s countrified version of “Steppin’ Out” – it’s more of a sore thumb than the inspired reading it might be in another context. When it comes to covers… some folks balk at note-by-note tributes, as they’d just as soon listen to the original again. While others are just as suspicious of all out reinvention, which can remove everything you liked about the tune in the first place. Lynne Me Your Ears falls in the former’s camp, but that group mind-think is one of the album’s strengths. Plenty of little treasures can be found here, like Bill Lloyd’s gorgeous “When Time Stood Still” and The dB’s Peter Hosapple’s take on “No Time.”