The first album Elton John wrote without Bernie Taupin
Thinking of Elton John‘s music without the work of Bernie Taupin just feels wrong. Throughout the duo’s songwriting partnership, the world has been graced with countless melodies that have worked their way into people’s hearts everywhere. Although John and Taupin were cut from the same cloth, there were a few times when they began to drift apart.
Then again, John and Taupin were never exactly joined at the hip to begin with. During one of John’s many failed auditions, he stumbled upon Taupin by happenstance, getting a letter from one of the executives who took pity on him by giving him a letter with Taupin’s handwritten lyrics. Enamoured with what he saw, John would seek out Taupin and strike up a friendship, bonding over their mutual love of westerns and a shared love of music.
Starting with one of Taupin’s lyrics, John would slave over his piano until he came up with something that worked, giving birth to future classics like ‘Your Song’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ from Taupin’s poetry. As the duo started to make their way into the late 1970s, it was time for a change when working on the next handful of projects, with Taupin leaving to work with Alice Cooper for his comeback album, From the Inside.
Speaking about the split, John simply thought that it was time for some fresh air, telling Rolling Stone, “Bernie and I never split up. But we were doing a lot of drugs and drinking heavily, and he was beginning to write with other people, which made me a little jealous, but I decided I’d write with some other people. We never discussed it, we just let it go, and it hurt. It hurt him, and it hurt me, but we both had the resilience and the intelligence to know that if we didn’t let each other write with other people, it would be the end of our relationship.”
While John was more than capable of writing melodies on his own, A Single Man would be the first album written without his longtime partner. Drafting in composer Gary Osbourne, John set out to write hits independently, scoring a song on the charts titled ‘Part Time Love’. Although he and Taupin would join forces again, John would find himself working off and on with Osbourne, writing songs on albums like The Fox and Leather Jackets, the latter of which John cited as one of his worst.
Even though the lack of Taupin’s graphic imagery was sorely missed, the album also allowed John to flex his muscles from an instrumental standpoint. Excluding the beginning of ‘Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’, John created his first instrumental entitled ‘Song For Guy’, which he was so proud of he almost released it as a single on its own before being talked down by his label.
While most of Elton John’s music tends to have a similar sound (the music’s by the same person, after all), there’s an intrinsic magic he captured with Taupin that will always be the defining element of his sound. Regardless of John’s penchant for writing fairly enjoyable pop hits outside his wheelhouse, the lack of his partner in crime made A Single Man feel both happy and bittersweet at the same time.
