Music / ↳ Handle With Care

Handle With Care

Written by: All five Wilburys (music by George Harrison, opening lyrics from Bob Dylan) Lead vocals: Harrison (verses), Roy Orbison (bridge), Tom Petty (final verse), full band (chorus) Length: 5:17 Album: Vol. 1, track 1

Every Traveling Wilburys song has a good story behind it. This one has the best story, because it's the reason any of the others exist at all. Harrison needed a spare B-side for a European single. What he got instead, in one afternoon at Bob Dylan's Malibu garage, was a song so good that Warner Bros. refused to let it hide on the back of a 12-inch. The full account, the barbecue, the box in the garage, the title, lives on the band history page. This page is about the song itself.

Musically, "Handle With Care" is built to showcase exactly what made this lineup absurd: Harrison's plainspoken verses give way to a soaring Roy Orbison bridge that instantly raises the emotional stakes of the entire track, before Tom Petty takes the final verse home and the whole band piles into the chorus together. Bob Dylan's harmonica threads through the arrangement, understated but unmistakable. It's a song that structurally forces five different vocal personalities to share one another's spotlight, and every one of them takes the handoff without missing a beat.

Released as the album's lead single, "Handle With Care" reached the lower rungs of the Billboard Hot 100, a modest commercial showing that undersells how instantly the song became a radio and MTV staple, and how completely it reoriented five separate careers. The music video, shot at an abandoned Los Angeles brewery in October 1988, is the only Wilburys clip to feature Roy Orbison, making it, by pure accident of timing, both the beginning of the band's audiovisual history and a small memorial to it.

Decades on, "Handle With Care" remains the song most casual fans can name if they know only one Wilburys track, and the song longtime fans still point to as the moment they realized the whole record was going to be this good.

Next track: Dirty World. Or see the full Vol. 1 tracklist.