Songfacts®:

• Jeff Lynne hadn't planned on recording new material to follow up 2015's Alone in the Universe, but much to his surprise, this song came "from out of nowhere." Lynne explained to Louder:
  
  "I was just sitting at my guitar like I normally would, and this chord sequence came to me and I just went, 'Oh, that's good!'
  
  The title came to me because the chords came to me so quickly. I started singing the little melody and it gradually grew, and I extended bits and made them bigger, and then I started recording it in my home studio."
• Lynne ended up recording a whole album, with all the songs coming as easily as the title track. He told Uncut magazine the record's title is a comment on where the songs came from.
  
  "When you're just messing around on a piano or a guitar, suddenly an idea will come and it will be tiny, maybe a fragment. six or seven notes and maybe four chords. That's enough to get me going and I'll say to myself, 'Oh, this is fun.' Then I can start expanding on it and making it into an actual song rather than just a little piece that floats in the air with nothing connecting it.
  
  But (the album) was also written at the same time as all those disasters were happening in California. It's almost joined up to that, to people having houses and suddenly there was a boulder bigger than the house coming down the mountainside. From out of nowhere there was now a big flat place where there used to be posh houses. So it's all those things. Whatever's here now didn't used to be, and that includes this whole album with 10 songs on it. Because the songs really did come out of nowhere."
• Apart from a piano solo on "One More Time" courtesy of ELO member Richard Tandy, Lynne plays every note of every instrument on From Out of Nowhere and handles all the vocals. He told Billboard:
  
  "To be honest, I love to play all those instruments. My favorite thing is when I'm overdubbing instruments onto a track and I love to play them. So that's why I choose to do them. I could easily get anybody to play them, probably, but I come up with the ideas and I like to play them and I've got all the gear, all the keyboards, all the guitars and the drums, the bass. As a player, it's just so much fun to do that. I'd rather do that than anything else."
• From Out Of Nowhere debuted atop the album UK chart, giving ELO their first #1 studio recording since 1981's Time. The band did reach the summit in 2016 with their greatest hits collection, All Over The World: The Very Best Of. That record's success was helped by ELO's performance in the Glastonbury legends' slot.