Songfacts®:

• This was a hit single from the British symphonic rock band Electric Light Orchestra's double album, Out of the Blue, recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany during the summer of 1977. The song finds ELO leader Jeff Lynne searching for the elusive sweet talkin' woman. He asks everyone he knows where he can find her, and even calls the operator to ask about her whereabouts, but his search is fruitless. Seems she doesn't want to be found.
• The song was originally called "Dead End Street" before Jeff Lynne decided he wasn't happy, so he erased the vocal track and re-wrote the lyrics. Some words that survived from that version can be heard in the opening of the third verse, "I've been livin' on a dead end street." Lynne recalled in an interview with Uncle Joe Benson on Off the Record: "It was a song called Dead End Street. I'd done all the words and everything, finished it. And I came down the next day in the studio and I went, 'I hate that. Let's rub all the vocals off.' And so, he goes, 'Really?' Y'know, me engineer. And I said, 'Yup. Get rid off everything off there. Whatever to do with the vocals.' And he did. He rubbed 'em all off. And I'd been sitting up in the hotel, which is above the studio, working at night just trying to think of a new tune and new words, which I did. And tried it the next day and there they worked. So, it was a good job I did, but it also meant changing the arrangement slightly. So a lot of pairs of scissors were used that day."
• The USA single release was 10 seconds shorter than its British counterpart due to a slightly faster mix. It is not known whether it was purposely edited to help the song to get more airplay or a simple error due to the tape machine being run at the wrong speed.
• Like several songs on the Out Of The Blue album, "Sweet Talkin' Woman" made use of the Vocoder 2000. ELO were one of the first music acts to make extensive use of the vocoder, which could synthesize voice into a robotic sound.
• Robert John "Mutt" Lange inadvertently ripped off this track when he wrote the Huey Lewis & the News song "Do You Believe In Love?," for their 1982 Picture This album. The verses have the same melody and the lyrics of the opening verse are remarkably similar. "I was walking down a one way street; Just a looking for someone to meet; One woman who was looking for a man."