The 1972 Elton John song that predicted Bernie Taupin’s divorce: “Very cinematic”
Elton John and Bernie Taupin have a pretty beautiful collaborative relationship, one which has seen them land over 50 top 40 singles throughout their decades of making music together.
Most of the time, when they’re writing, they work in separate rooms. Taupin takes himself away to pen whatever lyrics come to mind, meanwhile, John sits at a piano, banging away on the black and white keys until some kind of usable melody comes to mind. It’s a unique approach, sure, but why would you question something which has proven to be successful time and time again?
Interestingly, though, when Elton John was first working out the introduction to ‘Tiny Dancer’, he and Taupin were both in the room together. The foundation of the song was laid in the presence of both, as they looked at one another and knew that they had some kind of hit on their hands. The song they wound up writing is considered one of Elton John’s very best, it’s catchy and laced with emotion, but it’s also epic in its run time and leaves the listener in a real suspended state of tension.
“’Tiny Dancer’ has a really long lyric, a very cinematic, California-in-the-early-1970s lyric, so it had two verses and a middle eight before it even gets to the chorus, and it lent itself to a long buildup,” said John. “The middle eight sets it up well, then it slows down for a moment – ‘when I say softly, slowly…’ That line suggested a big chorus. I don’t remember much about writing it, but I do remember trying to make it sound as Californian as possible.”
There were two major influences at play when it came to writing the song. One, as John alludes to above, was California, but the other was Bernie Taupin’s girlfriend at the time and soon-to-be wife, Maxine Feibelman. It’s never explicitly been confirmed, but we can pretty much guarantee that the song was about Feibelman, given in the liner notes for the track, it simply reads: “With love to Maxine.”
A simple declaration of love, sure, but ‘Tiny Dancer’ also doubles up as a song that foreshadows his and his wife’s eventual split. That combination of modern love with California was a representation of the past and the present, something that Taupin found himself enamoured with at the time, and something else which he would eventually become enamoured with.
Taupin himself has admitted that when he was writing the song and trying to make it sound like something which has come from the coast in California, he was thinking of the women he would meet in California at the time, how he felt towards them, and the free-loving nature of the entire state. He certainly managed to capture both of these elements in the track, which is considered a love ballad for the ages.
“We came to California in the fall of 1970, and sunshine radiated from the populace,” he said. “I was trying to capture the spirit of that time, encapsulated by the women we met – especially at the clothes stores up and down the Strip in LA. They were free spirits, sexy in hip-huggers and lacy blouses, and very ethereal… So different from what I’d been used to in England…”
I suppose in some ways, if a marriage ends, then every song written about it at the time, in some way, prefaces the divorce. However, with ‘Tiny Dancer’, by channelling the spirit of California in his loving ode, Bernie Taupin managed to really make a track that doubled up as both a celebration of love and a representation of how finite it can be.
