The 1959 song Elton John called “one of the greatest”
Elton John was more of a craftsman than he was a true songwriter at the best of times.
Anyone can try and reach deep inside of themselves and pull out a piece of their soul that no one had ever heard before, but what made John’s songs so special was the attention to detail that he put into every single melodic line whenever he was interpreting Bernie Taupin’s words on each of his records. He wanted to make the kind of recording that would best fit whatever lyric was given to him, but there were bound to be other records that blew everything else out of the water for him.
And it’s not like John ever didn’t know what he was talking about whenever it came to recordings. He knew the details behind compositions ever since studying piano, but when you listen to the way that he interpreted a lot of the classical pieces that he heard as a kid, they weren’t going to have nearly the same impact that early rock and roll did when he was keeping track of the charts.
He was a nerd for everything that was on the hit parade, and he knew what a hit record was going to sound like well before it had even started to reach the top of the charts. But even though there was a very specific formula that the charts may have been looking for around that time, John understood that there was a lot more that music had to offer other than what was popular all the time.
No one would have really cared about what Pat Boone sounded like if they heard Little Richard those original rock and roll tunes, and the lion’s share of everything that John made was indebted to the original sources of rock and roll and soul music. There was more than a little bit of camp in there as well, but he knew that Aretha Franklin could pretty much outdo anyone else in the rock and roll sphere when she had a microphone in her hand.
Everyone coming out of the R&B scene had clearly done their musical homework, but none of them would have been able to make it without Nina Simone coming first. Simone absorbed every single piece of music that she was ever involved with, and while her versions of songs like ‘Feeling Good’ have been immortalised as some of the best soul songs of all time, Nina Simone at Town Hall was the best indication of her genius for John.
He didn’t necessarily have to see that she wrote her own material, because when she did her version of a song like ‘I Put A Spell On You’, she put everyone else to shame as soon as the song started, saying, “[Her version of] ‘I Put a Spell on You’ – one of the greatest recordings of all time – by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. And the great thing is, you listen to those songs today, and they still sound beautiful and fresh.”
And the reason why it stands as immortal is because of how sparse it is. Anyone else could have been distracted by the millions of effects they could have put on their vocals throughout any particular song, but Simone knew that there was no way that she was going to let someone cannibalise her material just for the sake of making something that sounded different from her contemporaries.
Her mission was to make the music that served the song perfectly, and ‘I Put A Spell On You’ was the best example of her using the sparseness to her advantage. There didn’t have to be a lot going on in the mix to wow somebody, and the mark of any good singer on Simone’s level is being able to take that kind of silence and make it sound just as important as any note she ever sang.
