The Elton John album he called “the bravest” he made
It takes a certain bravery for any artist to create a mainstream album. As much as it might be easy to string a melody together for the uninitiated, being able to open up your heart on record and lay it bare for the rest of the world takes an enormous amount of courage before an artist even enters the studio. While Elton John has been known to lay down his innermost feelings any time he sings, he’s still proud of one album for how much he revealed about himself.
Then again, John would never express himself by putting words to any of his songs. Since he didn’t think he was any good at writing lyrics, his partnership with Bernie Taupin was a match made in musical heaven, with the poet providing standalone stories for John to bring to life like ‘Tiny Dancer’ or ‘Daniel’.
Although John has admitted on numerous occasions that he doesn’t always relate to what Taupin presents to him, he can still find ways to inhabit his songs, as if he’s a musical actor trying to put his spin on the lyrics. When something did connect with both artists, though, John would create some of his most timeless melodies, like the wistful ode to their childhood love of westerns on tracks like ‘Roy Rogers’.
After creating landmark pop singles like ‘Your Song’, John wanted to take his music further on his albums. Even though he did not need to make double albums, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road would become one of his most celebrated musical statements, boasting tracks that feel like standalone vignettes like ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’ and ‘Candle In The Wind’.
Looking to push his sound even further, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy saw the duo working on the most epic material that they had worked on. While pieces like ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ may have been edited in various places for radio, the album can’t truly be appreciated unless taken in as a whole, with each song offering insight into the duo’s rise to the top of the musical world.
When going through his discography for Rolling Stone, John would consider Captain Fantastic one of the most daring undertakings he ever made, saying, “I wrote a lot of the songs on the SS France going from Southampton to New York. I took the band – Nigel [Olsson] and Davey [Johnstone] came with me – and I wrote the songs on the lunch hour because the piano room was booked by an opera singer for most of the day…The album was written in running order – from start to finish, it was a story – and at that point, the bravest album I’d made.”
While the album would become one of the highlights of John and Taupin’s creative partnership, John dared to get even more adventurous when he first presented the album to the public. After the album’s release, John would perform massive stadium shows, playing the entire album.
Although the band may have taken pride in their work, John would later recall how dimwitted the decision was, recalling in his book ME that there were a lot of long faces in the crowd when they realised they would be hearing songs they had never heard before instead of John’s hits. Regardless of the way the album was marketed, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy represent the apex of John and Taupin’s partnership, showcasing bulletproof melodies and lyrics telling the story of the duo going from meagre songwriting hopefuls to two of the biggest names in music.
