Elton John could never be satisfied staying in one place.
His approach to music changed about as much as his outfits during his prime, and while it always came back to the songs, it was about how he dressed them up that made them spectacular. But the English piano legend had a handful of songs he could never lose with.
But John was a bit of an outlier compared to every other songwriter of his generation. He was thrown into the mix with every glam-rock icon from around this time, like David Bowie and Marc Bolan, but that wasn’t where he belonged. He grew up listening to singer-songwriters, and listening to his tunes, they have the same complexity and lyrical depth that you would find in someone like Leon Russell or James Taylor than any of the average English glitter acts.
And while he did have a great rapport with many collaborators, nothing was going to beat what he could do with Bernie Taupin. In essence, Taupin’s lyrics were a roadmap for him a lot of the time to start working on something, and when anyone has lines as strong as the ones on ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, it demands something much more grandiose than playing a few chords and hoping for the best.
Also, it’s worth noting that Taupin never stuck to one specific style of lyric. ‘Crocodile Rock might have been a cheeky bit of fun that no one needed to think about too hard, but the characters throughout songs like ‘Levon’ and ‘Roy Rogers’ are always packed full of soul, as if Taupin knew all of the characters personally and needed to tell their life stories to give them flesh and blood.
Some songs were peppy, but the morose tunes were always where John thrived. He never struck out when making earnest love songs or the occasional rocker, but some of his finest work can only come from a place of pain in some respects, like the gorgeous intro ‘Funeral For a Friend’ or the emotional crisis going on in the lines to ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’.
John is more than happy to work with whatever Taupin threw in front of him, but he knew that playing sad songs would have been fine for him, saying, “I love writing sad music. I could write that all day long. That’s very self-indulgent, but I could write songs like ‘Funeral For a Friend’ or ‘A Song For Guy’ forever. That’s the sort of person I am, so I have to control that a little bit, but with Taupin’s lyrics sometimes, it’s not easy because they’re very self-destructive lyrics.”
And listening to some of John’s finest work, the mournful songs speak for themselves. A track like ‘Candle in the Wind’ works perfectly whether it’s being sung about Princess Diana or Marilyn Monroe, and even when John writes a song too close to home like ‘Empty Garden’, he knows how to squeeze every ounce of emotion out of both his voice and the piano whenever the RECORD light is on.
But John’s penchant for sad songs is probably why a tune like ‘Crocodile Rock’ doesn’t really do it for him over the years. That song is so optimistic it might as well have sunshine shooting out of its ass, but John knows that even the happiest songs of all time work because they acknowledge that comes with everyday life.
