The 1973 song Elton John regretted not putting out as a single: “We could have kept going”
While Elton John had many career highs in terms of his singles discography, there’s little denying that his high point in terms of producing exceptional albums was 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
An ambitious double album which produced several outstanding singles in itself, it’s undoubtedly the most complete body of work that he’s ever produced, and one of the most flawless pop records of all time. The fact that people still discuss the record and its brilliance over 50 years on from its release, and not just the singles it produced, perfectly exemplifies how stellar it is and how influential it will continue to be to the wider pop music landscape.
It’s diverse, and from the singles alone you can tell that, with the likes of the title track, ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’ all demonstrating just how in tune with each other he and his songwriting partner, lyricist Bernie Taupin, had become after a few years of working together.
However, as successful as these singles and the album as a whole may have been, John himself wasn’t totally satisfied with having to call time on the album campaign, and believed that he could have milked it for a lot longer by celebrating some of the other tracks on the album with an official single release.
In fact, John revealed in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone that he saw potential for many more singles to come out from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and if we’re being perfectly honest, most of the album’s tracklist would have been worthy of such levels of promotion. That being said, there was one song in particular that he personally believed would have outsold the four tracks he had previously put out as singles, and could have become one of his most enduring hits.
“We could have put out other singles like ‘Harmony’ and sold even more records,” he told Rolling Stone, referring to the album’s closing track. While the verses are a little more downcast than some of the other songs he’d previously put out, the chorus erupts by modulating emphatically into a major key, showing off John’s incredible ear for the construction of a song.
However, John noted that while ‘Harmony’ could have been a great single, the way that the music industry worked was what ultimately stood in his way. “In those days, a record was off the radio after eight or nine weeks,” he explained.
“These days, you look at the Adult Contemporary charts, and it’s like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This record came out two and a half years ago!’”
On top of that, such were the demands to keep releasing new music, he found himself being forced into a corner and needing to pursue the next chapter rather than using material from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road until the well had dried up.
Saying, “We could have kept going with singles, but we’d already finished Caribou by the time ‘Bennie and the Jets’ came out as a single. We were ready to move on.”
To be fair, even though some of the album tracks like ‘Harmony’, or the outstanding ‘Grey Seal’, are criminally underrated, the album deserves to be listened to as a whole anyway, so the fact that these were never given the chance to thrive in the charts doesn’t matter all that much.
