The Band / Why No Volume 2

Why Is There No Traveling Wilburys Vol. 2?

Here's a piece of trivia that stops even casual fans mid-sentence: the Traveling Wilburys released exactly two studio albums. The first was called Vol. 1. The second was called Vol. 3. There is no Vol. 2, there never was a Vol. 2, and George Harrison never gave a straight answer about why.

The Short Version

It was a joke, and Harrison was the one telling it. According to Jeff Lynne, the decision came down to a single, characteristically dry line from Harrison: "Let's confuse the buggers." That's it. That's the whole official explanation, as much as one exists. Mo Ostin, the Warner Bros. chairman who'd been there from the beginning, later described the choice as simply "George being George," a wry, needling bit of mischief from a man who'd spent his entire career in a band famous for planting jokes inside its own artwork.

The Leading Theories

Since Harrison never elaborated much further, fans and journalists have spent three decades filling in the gap with competing explanations. None of them are confirmed, but a few have stuck around long enough to be worth knowing:

The bootleg theory. By far the most repeated explanation involves an unauthorized Wilburys bootleg that had reportedly begun circulating under the title Volume 2 sometime after Vol. 1's release, compiling B-sides, outtakes, or simply mislabeled material. Under this theory, titling the real second album Vol. 3 was Harrison's way of leapfrogging the bootleg entirely, making it instantly identifiable as fake by anyone who noticed the numbering didn't add up.

The "stolen material" story. Harrison himself once told an interviewer, with a straight face difficult to verify secondhand, that the band had been working on a second album's worth of material that was "stolen" before it could be finished, implying that a lost Vol. 2 genuinely existed at some point, in some form, before circumstances (or Harrison's storytelling) intervened.

The Full Moon Fever theory. A more structural explanation points to Tom Petty's 1989 solo album Full Moon Fever, produced by Jeff Lynne with guest contributions from Harrison, recorded in the gap between the two official Wilburys releases. The sound, the personnel, and the loose spirit are close enough to the Wilburys' own records that some fans have long treated Full Moon Fever as the unofficial second Wilburys album in all but name and songwriting credit, which would make Vol. 3, chronologically and spiritually, the third Wilburys-adjacent record, numbering be damned.

The tribute theory. A gentler read, and one that requires no bootleg or theft at all: some have suggested the "3" was simply a nod to Roy Orbison, whose death between the two albums left an absence that the surviving members wanted acknowledged somehow, even obliquely, in a title. This theory tends to get less traction than the others, if only because Harrison's own "confuse the buggers" quote makes the mischievous explanation feel far more in character.

Why It's Never Been Definitively Settled

Part of what keeps this mystery alive is that nobody involved seemed to think it needed solving. The Wilburys were, from day one, a project built on bits nobody fully explained: the fake half-brothers, the invented family patriarch, the liner notes written by Monty Python members under academic pseudonyms. Numbering a sequel Vol. 3 fits that pattern so neatly that pushing Harrison for a literal answer would have rather missed the point. He was not a man inclined to ruin a good joke by clarifying it.

What's certain is this: Vol. 3 was recorded in 1990 as a four-piece, following Roy Orbison's death in December 1988, with new pseudonyms adopted by the surviving members (Spike, Clayton, Boo, and Muddy) and dedicated in the liner notes to "Lefty," Orbison's own alias. Whatever Vol. 2 might once have been, in whatever form Harrison was or wasn't joking about, it never saw an official release. As far as the discography is concerned, the Wilburys skipped a number and never looked back.

Read the full details on Vol. 3 itself, or head back to the band's complete history for the whole story from the beginning.