The career-defining song Elton John called “perfect”
One song can change the course of an entire career for the right or wrong reasons. Elton John is acutely aware that a hit single’s power can lay the foundations for a record-breaking future. However, despite the gold that waited for him on the yellow brick road, John never believed it was his destiny to be a huge pop star until a single piece of music transformed everything.
During a recent appearance on the Smartless podcast, John reflected on his humble beginnings and aspirations, noting, “I was a kid in a candy store, I never really visualised Elton John being a big star. It all happened by accident.” His rise to superstardom was a whirlwind, and seemingly, within the blink of an eye, he’d gone from living a normal life to being unable to leave the house without being swarmed.
Elton’s debut album, Empty Sky, didn’t catch fire with the general public upon its release in 1969. His label didn’t expect his next record to be a commercial success, nor did John. Instead, the plan was to release the collection of songs with the hope of enticing other artists to cover the tracks and one becoming a hit. Shortly after the album’s release, ‘Your Song’ was picked up by Three Dog Night, inadvertently leading to the original becoming an international hit single and more beloved than to cover.
Nine months after the release of the eponymous Elton John, ‘Your Song’ rose to eighth in the United States and seventh in Elton’s home country. The project unexpectedly made him a star, thrusting him from a background figure in the music industry into the limelight. In Elton’s mind, the explanation for the song’s success is purely down to the power of the songwriting.
Despite the wisdom in the lyrics, Bernie Taupin was only 19 when he penned the words for ‘Your Song’. Meanwhile, Elton was only three years older than his collaborator when he laid down his iconic vocals on the recording. He’s grown into the song over the years and loves it more now than he initially did in 1970.
In 2013, Elton told Rolling Stone: “What can I say, it’s a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it. I remember writing it at my parents’ apartment in North London, and Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a great lyric, I can’t fuck this one up’.”
He continued: “It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in, and we both knew. I was 22, and he was 19, and it gave us so much confidence. ‘Empty Sky’ was lovely, but it was very naive. We went on to do more esoteric stuff like ‘Take Me to the Pilot,’ of course, but musically, this was a big step forward. And the older I get, the more I sing these lyrics, and the more they resonate with me.”
Taupin feels equally positively about ‘Your Song’ and once said: “This one is the one I recall like it was yesterday. The rest of them I’m a little shaky on. In retrospect, and I’ve said it on several occasions, I see this song as a bookend, and its counterpart would be a song like ‘Sacrifice’. ‘Your Song’ being a song about absolute naiveté in love while ‘Sacrifice’ is the complete opposite, the story of someone who’s seen and done it all, as far as love’s concerned, and come out the other end scarred but realistic about certain aspects of the real world.”
If ‘Your Song’ had never been released, there’s a strong chance that John would never have become ‘The Rocketman‘. While he’d have been content with spending the rest of his career writing for other artists along with Taupin, he had more to give the world than that. Thankfully, it put John on people’s radar, and he worked himself into the ground to ensure he didn’t let that position slip. Admittedly, fortune also played a role in the song becoming a hit record, and plenty of other perfect tracks never received this slice of luck. However, world-class songwriting undeniably played a pivotal role in ‘Your Song’ turning John from an unknown to a household name.
