An oedipal complex and intuition: How Elton John wrote ‘Tiny Dancer’
Elton John is one of the most dynamic and creative artists of recent decades. Regardless of which era of his you are talking about, it is laced with exceptional hits and outstanding live performances. The 1970s saw his rise to fame, but he proved when he headlined Glastonbury in 2023 that despite five decades flying by, he still can wheel out the classics and capture the hearts of thousands.
What’s interesting about John’s music is that, unlike other great songwriters from that period, understanding his motive and emotional state when writing songs isn’t as black and white as just listening to the lyrics. There are a lot of other artists where you don’t have to dig much to understand their frame of mind, but it’s a lot different for John, given he wasn’t the only person responsible for his music.
Elton John and Bernie Taupin were joined at the hip. Their working dynamic was simple but effective, as Taupin would write the lyrics, and John was responsible for the music. There was no specific order with which they would come; however, John has admitted when talking about his ‘70s hit ‘Tiny Dancer’ that Taupin wrote the lyrics first, and the words very much inspired the music.
In that sense, the means by which Elton John wrote the song was fairly straightforward, as he was handed the lyrics and worked out the music based on what was written. Subsequently, to truly understand the writing process behind ‘Tiny Dancer’, we must turn to Taupin, whose version of events is somewhat contradictory.
Initially, it was believed that the song was written about Maxine Feibelman. She was his girlfriend at the time and would become his first wife. Her being the subject matter didn’t come as a surprise to many people, as lyrics such as “Seamstress for the band” were so rooted in realism that people everywhere believed the track was written about an actual person.
This was reaffirmed in the liner notes for the album Madman Across the Water, where it was confirmed that Taupin’s girlfriend was the muse for the song. However, Taupin went back on this explanation some decades later, stating that it wasn’t about anyone specifically but more a general comment on some of the women in clothes stores that they met.
“We came to California in the fall of 1970, and sunshine radiated from the populace. 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,” he said, “They were free spirits, sexy in hiphuggers and lacy blouses, and very ethereal, the way they moved. So different from what I’d been used to in England. And they all wanted to sew patches on your jeans. They’d mother you and sleep with you—it was the perfect Oedipal complex.”
Whether this is actually the inspiration behind the song or whether Taupin just wanted to rescind his original inspiration after his and Feibelman’s divorce remains up for debate.
