Jeff Lynne said he wrote “Let It Shine” with Brian Wilson at Wilson’s house in Malibu, and that the collaboration took place while Wilson was going through one of the hardest periods of his life. Lynne said Wilson was “really struggling” and that working with him then was “horrible.”

“We wrote ‘Let It Shine’ at his house in Malibu. He was really struggling in his life. It was horrible, and he was being treated badly. But you could see what a nice guy he was despite everything happening in the background,” Lynne said. He added that “it was all very distressing,” and said he saw Dr. Landy only “a couple of times,” walking around “with his cape and walking stick.”

The remarks matter because Lynne is one of the best-known producers in popular music, with a career tied to ELO and The Beatles, and his account adds a rare firsthand glimpse into the uneasy period when Wilson was under the influence of his abusive therapist, Dr. Landy. Lynne said it was difficult to figure out what Wilson was going for during that time, a sign of how unsettled the creative process could be even inside a celebrated partnership.

That tension is part of what makes Lynne’s recollection stand out. The song was born in a private setting, in Malibu, but the story around it was shaped by a wider crisis that Lynne said he could see but did not fully want to discuss. He said plainly that he did not really want to talk about Dr. Landy, leaving the impression of a collaboration marked as much by discomfort as by music.

For Wilson, the memory is another reminder of how closely his work was tied to the turmoil around him. For Lynne, it is a rare public acknowledgment that one of his most famous collaborations came with an atmosphere he found deeply troubling, and that the shadows around it were impossible to ignore.