You'll be happy to know that unlike Lou Reed's "
Perfect Day" and Devo's "
Beautiful World," there's nothing subversive in "Mr. Blue Sky." The song really is about a happy, warm feeling on a sunny day.
It's the closing song on the third side of Electric Light Orchestra's 1977
Out Of The Blue album. Known as "Concerto For A Rainy Day," that album side starts with a song called "Standin' in the Rain" and follows the concept of a rainy day that comes to an end.
On a BBC Radio interview, ELO leader Jeff Lynne talked about how he came up with this song after he locked himself away in a Swiss chalet attempting to write ELO's follow-up to their album A New World Record. "It was dark and misty for two weeks, and I didn't come up with a thing. Suddenly the sun shone and it was, 'Wow, look at those beautiful Alps.' I wrote 'Mr. Blue Sky' and 13 other songs in the next two weeks."
Jeff Lynne has a "blue" streak: Other songs he wrote for ELO include "Out of the Blue" and "Midnight Blue." Lynne is from the Birmingham area in England, where the Birmingham Football Club (or as Americans call it, "soccer team") is called the Birmingham Blues. The "blues" in these songs are in some way a tribute to his team.
The synthesized voice at the end of the song sings "please turn me over" because in the old days when we used to listen to our music on vinyl, we had to turn the record over to hear the other side.
In 2003, "Mr. Blue Sky" was featured in
commercials for the Volkswagen convertible Bug. The spot shows a man slogging through his work day until he stops to look out a window and sees what's out there. The song was also used in commercials for Sears.
Jeff Lynne was quite pleased with this song. "It captured what my vision of ELO was all about," he said. "All the bits that come in and out, the backing vocals, the cellos sliding, all the little naughty bits, the sound effects, everything is exactly what I imagined ELO to be." (quoted in Hi-Fi News & Record Review, 2014)
"Mr. Blue Sky" is played before the start of every football (soccer) match played by Birmingham City Football Club (nickname: "The Blues"). Many fans of the club associate the song with a former player (and later manager), Trevor Francis, who, through his association with the club in the '70s, was believed to be friends with supporter Jeff Lynne.
This was used as the theme song to the short-lived 2004 series on NBC called LAX, which starred Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood as the runway and terminal managers, respectively.
The Office producer Greg Daniels also wanted to use it as the theme to the American version of the show but couldn't because LAX had already taken it.
This song was used quite effectively in
the trailer to the 2004 Jim Carrey movie
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which developed a cult following and gave Ariana Grande inspiration for her 2024 album
Eternal Sunshine.
It's also used in the 2004 horror movie spoof Shaun Of The Dead and the 2007 film
Martian Child with John Cusack.
Jeff Lynne and Richard Tandy of ELO performed "Mr. Blue Sky" with Ed Sheeran at the Grammy Awards in 2015. ELO, which never won a Grammy, had returned to action in 2014 with a concert at Hyde Park in London, rebranded "Jeff Lynne's ELO."
According to data provided by music discovery app Shazam, Lynne, Tandy and Sheeran's performance provided the most Shazamed moment of the entire telecast.
This plays during the opening credits of the 2017 movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in what director James Gunn called "the most hugely insane shot I've ever done." Like the first film, the soundtrack is made up of '70s hits that Chris Pratt's character plays throughout on a Walkman.
"Mr. Blue Sky" was one of the first songs Lynne wrote for Out Of The Blue in Switzerland. He recalled in the 2018 book Wembley Or Bust:
"We'd hired all this gear out of a music shop in Geneva and we drove up to the mountain chalet where we were staying and set it all up. There was a lovely little pub about half a mile away from the chalet, it was a great atmosphere, and a nice little country location. Nobody knew who the hell anybody was, and it was just great fun to be there.
The lyrics to 'Mr. Blue Sky' are simple and easy to visualize. When the song is playing, you can picture everything that's going on and everybody knows what I'm talking about. It's the thought of, 'Oh, isn't it nice when the sun comes out?' And you know, it really is. 'The sky is blue, wow, what a thing.' It's a simple kid's story."
Listeners of UK station Greatest Hits Radio voted this the "happiest song ever" in a 2020 poll.
"Mr. Blue Sky" was never a big hit - it peaked at #35 in the US - but it has endured as Electric Light Orchestra's most popular song, in large part because of all the media uses in started garnering in the 2000s, which introduced it to a new generation. Journey's "
Don't Stop Believin'" has a similar story; it wasn't a huge hit when it was released in 1981 but really picked up steam two decades later. Both songs are very sincere and uplifting, which accounts for their long-lasting, multigenerational appeal.
