The 2006 song Elton John called his best vocal performance: “Beautiful”
When Elton John first got the idea of becoming a musician, being a lead singer was the last thing on his mind.
He didn’t consider himself to be in the same league as the true legends of rock and roll, and even if he was a songwriter before anything else, he could bend his voice into a million different shapes depending on what the song needed at every opportunity. But he felt that there were only a handful of songs where his voice was able to morph into something absolutely beautiful.
But when you look through a lot of John’s best songs, a lot of his vocal performances were about him trying to inhabit a character in the song as well. Bernie Taupin was known for writing some amazing lyrics for him to interpret, and while he didn’t have to know firsthand what it was like to be a seamstress for a rock and roll band in ‘Tiny Dancer’, his performance captured the feeling of a woman whose only home was life on the road.
And while his voice has gone through its fair share of ups and downs over the years, he has never tried to cheat his way through any of his performances. What you saw was what you got with him half the time, and when you hear him taking his voice down a few notches every time he sings, it’s almost like he was able to put some sense of musical wisdom into every single line that he sang.
It’s not always easy to keep approaching a song like ‘Crocodile Rock’ with the same passion as he used to, but he couldn’t really go wrong when working on tunes that were all about himself. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the first time that he and Taupin wrote about their time together, and while that resulted in one of their most accomplished albums ever, there was always going to be some question about whether or not there would be a sequel.
John wasn’t the kind to think in those terms, but The Captain and the Kid is the closest thing that we’re going to get to an extension of one of his best albums. He and Taupin had got back to writing about their roots all over again, and while John didn’t have the voice that he had when singing ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’, he felt that a song like ‘Blues Never Fade Away’ was among the finest performances that he ever laid down.
The whole song had a lot to say about those that he has lost over the years, and getting the chance to sing from the heart was all John could have asked for at this point in his career, saying, “It’s a beautiful lyric, and I think probably my best vocal on a record ever – I really believe that. I’m happy with the vocals on the whole album, but that one I sing with a special intensity. It’s a very angry song as well: ‘Targets on the rifle range/Who makes the call and who gets to choose?/Who gets to win and who gets to lose?’ It’s heart-wrenching when I think about what has happened.”
Since the song is all about the fallen friends that he has lost along the way, though, it’s not like John doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He has had too many of his friends fall by the wayside since he became a superstar, and whether it was John Lennon or Gianni Versace or Princess Diana, all of them seemed to be memorialised every single time he sang a song like this.
It’s never easy to move on from that kind of heartache, but it’s songs like this that keep their memory in people’s hearts. John didn’t really need to play the song every night for people to get the gist of what he was talking about, because anyone who has ever lost someone that they are close to can definitely relate to those who have been struck down in their prime with no clear explanation.
